Are CHEAP Budget SSD's Worth It...!? (AliExpress)

With Cheap SSDs becoming more and more available to everyone across the world, it leaves the question of - are they worth it? Well today we take at the 120GB, 512GB and 1TB options, both m.2 and sata 3 and compare them against the staple MX500 1TB, which has extremely good price performance for an SSD.

Check Prices:

💰

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DISCLOSURES: Generally all links tied to products are either Amazon, AliExpress or Ebay Affilaite links, this means that if you purchase a product we earn a small sales commission, which costs you nothing extra (if you end up purchasing a product). All sponsored content will contain the word "SPONSOR" if directly sponsored or "AD." Any additional revenue stream will be disclosed with similar disclosure.

Music Provided by either: monstercat, chukibeats, epidemicsound, vlognocopyright, audio library, no copyright sounds, royaltyfreeplanet or bassrebels

#SSD #budget #pcgaming

[MarcoGPUtuber]

I swear, I'm not the evil twin! He's the possessed one!

[AaronHendu]

I am still on SATA2 motherboard, and even with a slower SSD, it's definitely still much faster than any hard drive I have ever installed...boot time went down from 1.5+ minutes to about 10-15 I seconds. I'd say these cheap SSD are well suited to what I would be using them for. Tempted to replace my 1TB HDD storage with one of these.

[GoatZilla]

I was expecting to see some SD card in there with a SATA adapter.

[wisdoom]

Bro, drink some water, i think the heat finally messing with your head.
Can't blame you though, ~39°c over here.

[Trick-Framed]

"Let me run in circles for you guys!"
Pretends to be an airplane in a holding pattern... 🤣🤣🤣

[jvoulo]

I just finished watching your other video about the aliexpress case about an hour ago and I was like "I cant wait for him to make a review video on their SSDs" My wish has been granted.

[mariushmedias]

I don't know what you're talking about burst banks. There's no such thing. SSDs can configure portions of the Flash memory chips in pseudo-SLC mode or MLC mode, instead of TLC or QLC, and use that as a write cache. This is not separate chips, it's in the actual nand memory chips. This helps with the lifetime of the drive, because flash pages in SLC/MLC mode have higher endurance, more erase cycles. You were pointing in the video at the ram memory (ddr3l, ddr4) some controllers can optionally use.


Higher end SSD controllers also have ram as read/write cache and to store the sector information (SSDs don't have fixed sectors like mechanical drives, data is constantly shuffled around and written where there's an available "page" of nand memory). The amount of ram memory is usually 256-512 MB, but some SSDs can have up to 2-4 GB (the controllers are typically 32bit cores, so more than 4GB would make it difficult to design chip and also single ram chips that big in capacity are too expensive to use)

These SSDs from Aliexpress are cheap because they'll often use "b-grade" memory chips, chips that have even less endurance than the default memory chips that company makes - for example if the flash manufacturer sells a part advertising minimum 1000 erase cycles, these B-grade chips may have only 700-800 guaranteed erase cycles.

Also, they cut costs by reducing the number of channels - you can see for example at @3:00 a SSD that probably uses a controller capable of working with 4 channels (with 2 nand chips per channel), just like you have on motheboards 2 channels of ram with 2 slots on each channel. However, to cut costs they use only one chip, so only one channel is used. This makes the controller unable to read and write data in parallel from multiple channels and get high speeds, so you end up with a much slower SSD (just like you have a slower computer when you're using a single stick of RAM, because you don't have dual channel mode with one stick) and the controller's ability to do wear leveling and extend the life of the drive by shuffling the data between nand chips is severely reduced - ssd controllers can minimize the number of erase cycles by moving data to other nand chips when needed, but a ssd with one nand chip can't do that. So, these SSDs will reach that maximum erase cycles count faster.
Decent SSDs will use 3 or 4 lower capacity nand chips to keep speeds up, but of course a single nand chip is cheaper than 3 lower size chips.

[shoaib]

Can you do a long-term review of these SSDs later. They're cheap but they're not going to be very useful if most of them fail 4 weeks or 6 months later under light use.

[SpencerHHO]

As a tech enthusiast, i mostly watch techtube for entertainment as I can't justify dropping thousands on tech every year but I can honestly say this is one of the few videos that was genuinely very helpful to me, especially living in Australia.

[rafagebicki]

I'm looking for a cheap option to get a decent game ssd but those "cheap" ssd's aren't cheap enough to skimp on warranty and additional speeds with decent ssd's (atleast in central Europe)

[Slugg-O]

Speed is important but reliability is the key. I've had a couple of cheap drives and they went Tango Uniform in less than six months. I've got several Crucial and WD SSDs that are 3 times as old and still run reliably.

[duncan]

Way to go bryan!!! Keep the Aliexpress content coming.

[FieryWings]

Yass another Aliexpress video from quality content provider TechYesCity 👍🏼👌🏼

[MattsPaddock]

I was just looking at them the other day, Bryan with the perfect timing! 😁

[patpatpat]

Try also this ssd's vs. Kingston uv400 they're almost on par with price (atleast where I live)

[priscillaasagiri]

I have 3 budget 2TB SSD (1 Walram, 1 Somnambulist and 1 Acos) and their read/write are good 500/480. Considering each one cost like U$80, 00 its fine by me!

[rhyzon]

I bought a Reeinno 960 GB SSD from AliExpress 6 months ago to use as my steam library drive and it honestly surprised me. Pretty good drive for the price I payed (68 euros back in March) and fast enough if you keep it with around 25% free space. And even if you don't, it beats a normal HDD any day of the week.

[nelin]

I strongly recommend it as a gift for someone you don't like.

[geofftottenperthcoys]

Good timing have been looking at some of these for game drives.

[sarellamikk]

I built my PC about two years ago and went with one m.2 ssd and one sata one from Ali. Still working great. Whats funny, most PC stores in my country have started to sell these aswell. Just last month got one 256GB ssd for my school laptop. It was about 3€ more than in Ali and thanks to EU laws they need to offer warranty for it, seems like a great deal