SP 1TB SSD 3D NAND A55 SLC Cache Performance Boost SATA III 2.5 7mm (0.28) Internal Solid State Drive (SP001TBSS3A55S25)

I have three of these disks (1 TB) installed in a ZFS pool (no mirroring, no raidz). I needed cheap SSDs for my workloads, which are heavily write intensive, but require sporadic, small sized, random reads, a few times every second. Well, NAND flash can be great for that. Or at-least thats what youd expect. Sidenote: if you know anything about 7200rpm spinning drives, you know they can sustain a reasonable ~150-200MB/s sequential write, but throughput will suffer quite a bit if they need to simultaneously seek to fetch non-contiguous data. And then theres the issue of limited IOPS. I wasnt expecting miracles from these SSDs, but I was certainly expecting each to sustain atleast ~200 MB/s sequential writes. Well lo and behold, once you blow through the onboard SLC cache after a measly 30 seconds of writes at ~500MB/s, the drives start choking. Nothing more than ~65MB/s after that. I know these are TLC drives with SLC cache, but woof, those numbers arent great. So, if your workload isnt write heavy, by all means get this thing. But Id think youd want a little more performance out of something only fractionally cheaper than better performing alternatives. Also, no benchmarks posted on here use a large enough test file size to actually blow through the SLC cache, so the only thing you see results for is your SATA connection and/or packet congestion in the PCIe lane. On the positive side, sustained read performance was as expected, saturated the SATA III link without any issues.

UPDATE: 6/7/2023 =============== I just received my RMA replacements for the 3 drives drive below - this new batch 23015096 has some changes again, shouldnt be a surprise by now... Firmware: H220916a Size: 2.05TB/1.86TiB DRAT/DZAT *is* supported Case is now made of metal instead of plastic Quality remains to be seen and given the extreme variance within the product line my prior review still stands. A potentially OK replacement does not make up for the inability to provide a good product the first time - data is too valuable to risk to random drives. UPDATE: 5/17/2023 ================ I now have 3 more failed drives - all have serial numbers starting with YTAK from batches 23000184 and 23003845. These 3 latest failures powered down during a reboot and then refused to power back on at all. No system recognized them now. For those keeping score, I now only have 3 of these drive left alive, their serials start with AA (2TB, Firmware V0303B0), BB (2.05TB, Firmware SHFM60.0), and BC (2.05TB, Firmware SHFM60.0). Drives BB and BC are from the same batch. The AA drive is the first drive in this line I purchased end of October 2022. The BB/BC drives are from March and April 2023 respectively. The failed three (YTAK drives) are from December 2022 and February 2023. All drives were purchased exclusively from the Silicon Power merchant here on Amazon. The A55 2TB drive line is a complete disaster - do not trust your data to these drives. Regrettably these latest failed drives are under warranty but not within the Amazon return window so I am stuck with a RMA drives which will result in A55 replacements that cant be trusted... Too bad I have to give at least 1 star for a review - this product doesnt deserve even 1 star... UPDATE: 5/8/2023 =============== Verified that batch 23011662 with firmware HPS2704M is bad. All drives in this batch fail with the same errors when subjected around 5 hours of continuous writes. Since there is no way to determine which drive belongs to which batch when ordering (or even if any future batch will resolve this) the product is no longer able to function as intended - it corrupts data when writing. They were nice while they lasted but I cant rely on drives that change their internal hardware so frequently and then with relatively high probability of producing faulty devices as a result. I may consider them again at some future point but at this point I cant trust these drives to store my data. Rating is formally reduced to the minimum (1 star) as such a volatile produce design is unacceptable. If you get a good drive it will be fine but drive roulette is not game to be played. UPDATE: 5/7/2023 =============== Formally reducing review by 1 star (now 3 stars) because of the new 23011662 batch with firmware HPS2704M drives. The drive in my prior review was of this batch and so was its replacement. Both drives show ATA errors already (this new one as soon as I plugged it in) and neither drive supports SMART self-tests (prior batches/firmware did - as do ALL other SATA drives Ive ever used). SP tools do not (yet) recognize these drives so they cant run tests on them nor is there any new firmware to update to. The ATA error appears to be some sort of bug in the firmware that may not necessarily affect drive functionality so in a slightly risky move I am attempting to resilver onto this new replacement - time will tell if it suffers the same fate as the one it replaced. I also have another unopened drive of this same batch. I will be waiting a little before opening and testing it, pending the results I see here. This represents a significant reduction in quality control and makes me question further purchases. For now I am considering this a batch specific issue but if this continues I may need to review my star rating and find a new drive manufacturer. UPDATE: 5/1/2023 =============== I have purchased 8 of these drives so far for use in my ZFS pool. Overall I am pleased, especially for the price - they are replacing mechanical drives of comparable specs and as expected greatly outperform the spinning array. Quality control seem to be an issue though - of the 8 drives (technically 9 drives) two have now been defective shortly after arrival. As in showing I/O errors within 10hr of operations. This latest entry had a firmware version of HPS2704M and had ATA errors starting around 4hr resilvering mark (heavy write operations). It also refused to run SMART self tests - a bit odd since it does report SMART data... I might just have bad luck but we shall see as I have more drives to replace. 2 of 9 being faulty isnt good odds from my personal experience. The drives that work are working fine - no issues there so it seems that so far either they die quickly or work fine. Other interesting bits of information that might be useful to some - I run raidz2 with 8 drives per vdev. This last drive would have been the final replacement to an all flash vdev. I was getting sustained resilver speeds of around 350MB/s for several hours (i.e. up until failure). Back when the vdev was more spinning than flash I was getting speeds around 200MB/s for resilvering to flash and about 70MB/s resilvering to SMR 5400RPM drives - so overall a decent sustained performance despite being DRAMless. UPDATE: 2/6/2023 =============== The drive with firmware SN12429 (2.05TB) had write errors, only detectable via dmesg and ZFS error counts (SMART, badblocks, self-test, etc. all said everything was fine). Drive had to be RMAed. RMA process was quick and easy. Replacement drive has been received but is using firmware V1031C0 (2.00TB) which lacks DRAT/DZAT (not a big deal, just leaves me a little confused as to which firmware and feature set is supposed to be current and further proves the hardware variance despite using identical models and external appearance). (No firmware updates are available as per their firmware tool.) UPDATE: 1/6/2023 =============== Since for my use cases the limitations from my original review are acceptable I purchased another of these drives just a couple months later and I am surprised (in a good way) to report that the latest drive I received has a different firmware (possibly controller and/or NAND chips - not going to disassemble to verify). This new drive has firmware SN12429 and is 2.05 TB (1.86TiB) so slightly larger than the older drive. This new drive also DOES support DRAT/DZAT. Trim appears to function on my LSI 9211-8i (IT mode) under ZFS (2.1.4) with this drive. Other than those difference the drive appears to be otherwise identical to the older one. Hopefully this change remains in future drives, if so this is a decent drive for RAID/ZFS home use. Star rating remains unchanged as there is no way to know which version of the drive you have until you plug it in. Original Review (11/1/2022, Still Valid) ======================= Does what it should for the most part. It does slow down once you fill the SLC cache (as expected). Plastic casing (common for lower end SSDs) gives it a cheap and non-durable feel. This shouldnt matter too much unless you are doing a lot of hot swapping of the drive. GParted reports 1.82TiB usable space, the same as the 2TB HDD it replaced (so storage is a true 2TB not 1.92TB like some other 2TB models - this matters when replacing drives in arrays). Does not support DRAT/DZAT (Deterministic Read ZEROs After TRIM) - meaning no TRIM when connected to an LSI/Broadcom HBA. So while SP claims TRIM/RAID support it wont fully operate in all cases. Unfortunately the LSI/Broadcom HBAs are quite common and popular. Firmware V0303B0

Its only been a month or so since I did a drive swap and reinstall. We will see in the long run how its working still. Ill keep this updated but Id give it a 4 so far.

So I just purchased two more of these drives which are used in laptops around the house. The one that I purchased 4 years ago died at exactly 3.5 years. If you use these for anything more than light storage, the drives themselves will just stop responding to anything after the warranty expires. No complaints on the actual drive during use, and they seem very stable until they crash hard.

My old laptop turns on in 10 seconds with this HD wow!

I had this drive installed in a Windows 10 computer for a few months until one morning the computer no longer recognized the boot device. Tried Linux, DiskGenius, and another Windows system, but none would recognize the drive. It was a paperweight that weighed nothing. I went to the Silicon Power website to get an RMA number to return the drive (theres a 5-year warranty on it!), and on the RMA page were instructions to ship the drive back to Taipei, Taiwan through Customs Clearance. It turns out that shipping this back to Taiwan would cost me a minimum of $35, and up to $95 depending on how I shipped it. So at best Id maybe be a few bucks ahead after lost time acquiring an RMA and preparing the drive for shipment to Taiwan, then waiting possible weeks for a replacement. Less aggravation to just throw the thing in the garbage and cut my losses. In my experience with these drives, even though theyre cheap, they have a lower mean-time-to-failure than the mechanical hard drives theyve replaced (based on the half-dozen or so SPCC replacement drives of various capacities Ive had to replace in numerous systems due to failure). YMMV. And if you decide to make a warranty claim, well, good luck to ya.

Not a fan of Chinese brands but this brand proves it’s worth/value

Installed it on my MacBook Pro expecting to have a swiftly loading applications, but that did not happened. The item quality did not meet my expectations. If looking for a large drive with ok to fast transfer rate for backup, this is the drive for the job.

super

Excelente SSD calidad/precio, como siempre SP no decepciona, tengo otro SSD de 256gb del mismo modelo que compre hace ya varios años, se lo di a un amigo y sigue funcionando, le queda mucha vida aun.