Minor brand SSDs

I'm not done yet... still got to do the product photos (inside and out), and if I can summon the energy was going to look at what they report via SMART.

The Fastdisk comes in a retail blister pack.




Opening it up, we see a short board, with 4 flash devices and controller on one side. Peeling off the sticker reveals the SM2246XT. I'm not familiar with the logo on the flash. Text on the flash is:
PFC54
-10AR
1552

Separately in the corner is: VCBK or VCCC depending on the chip.




The reverse side shows 4 unused positions, allowing for a doubling of capacity if they were also used.




The Hypertec didn't come in any packaging. The drive seems a bit different, since the company appears to be a UK one, and manufactured in Mexico. This isn't your typical drive from China.




On this side we only see the controller chip under a thermal pad. Peeling away the pad reveals a SandForce SF-2241. There are 8 unused flash positions.




On the other side we find another 8 flash positions, with 4 of them used. There is no logo on the chips, only the text "10-2182-01-MTX-1AP".

The Kingfast comes in a cardboard box.




Opening it up we see the drive held inside more cardboard.




Internally we see a small board. It is interesting this drive reports under AIDA64 as a 1.8" drive, so it could be a rehoused part. There is the SM2246XT controller, and a single flash device fitted to one of 4 positions.
In the middle of the chip is marked:
6EC27
NW686
PF579 S8
The white block has a faint Micron logo in it.

To the side of there are another two lines of marking overlapping each other:
H641604
T56H




On the underside, there isn't anything of note.




The Hectron comes in a package with thin card outer sleeve.




Inside that outer sleeve is a card covered foam holder. Note the drive was supplied in an anti-static bag, which is not shown here as I had unpacked it earlier.




On this side of the board we see the SM2246XT once again. There are 8 flash positions of which 4 are filled.

The chips have GLOWAY on the top, and H27QDG8D2B8R which a search indirectly comes back with Hynix 16nm MLC. Under that is: B1B 1616.




The other side of the board has 8 more unused positions for more flash.

Thanks for all of this information!

We have a death!

The Hectron SSD was in my budget dual Xeon server. I was checking the level of Windows Updates when VNC lost connection, and I heard some beeps like it rebooted. Even after leaving it a while, I couldn't connect. I lugged it over to a monitor and it would POST, but no Windows. I have two drives on this system, the SSD holding the OS, and a 750GB SSHD holding a swap file. I wondered if the mechanical drive had died, so I disconnected that, leaving the SSD only. Still no boot, but this time instead of hanging, I got EFI shell. With little else to do, I looked around the bios and found the smoking gun. On the drive page, it listed detecting no drives.

While I could swap cables and power connectors, instead I got a USB to SATA adapter and hooked it up to my main system. No drive. Maybe the partition is corrupt? Fire up disk manager, nothing. It is like it isn't there at all.

I took the SSD apart. There was nothing obviously wrong on the board. No funny smells. I connected the PCB to the USB adapter again, and on plugging in saw a red LED come on. No idea what it means. Nothing changed from last time. Nothing. I put the SSHD on the SATA adapter, and up it popped.

So at this point, I'm declaring the SSD dead. It just isn't visible as a SATA device. I might give it one more go in a different system with an internal connection tomorrow just to make sure. Life was about 8 months to this point. I have no way to guess how much was written to it. As said, I did deliberately add the SSHD to hold the swap file. The main wear on the SSD would have been temporary boinc files while it was running.

Assuming the drive doesn't magically spring back to life, I have a new OS install to do tomorrow if I want to keep using the server.

But the other important question here is (and I realize you can't test for this in a short time) reliability and longevity. Are the cheap drives going to hold up over time like their more expensive counterparts? I see ADATA is not in the test sample. Does this brand fall outside of your criteria for cheap drives?

I knew that with one of each drive, running uncontrolled tasks, I'm not going to answer the long term reliability question. That one of them died already, is that because they were cheap, or would a branded one have done similarly? I can't answer that.

ADATA I'd place in the lower tiers of branded drives. They''re not much different from, for example, the lower end Kingston models.

I believe samsung ones own the fastest