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

Well worth the price. If youre a windows user dont waste your time trying to get their migration software from their website. They partner with someone who pulled the resource sonyou wont find it. Their packaging needs updating so thats why I deducted 1 star. Search reflect 8 for good free software. Me as a linux user, quick & easy. Everything worked fast. Gparted or DD works fine.

With all the fake (often with unknown brand) SSD out there, its always good to stick to known brands. This is a good genuine drive, with good read/write speed, which I am using for backup, on my Lenovo laptop, connected to USB-C, using a SATA to USB-C adapter. Those read/write results are while using that SATA to USB-C adapter, and may be different (faster?) if you plug this drive directly on your motherboard, using a SATA port.

It worked just as I hoped it would

2TB model Would not recognize in file explorer. Requires to open disk manager to activate and format the SSD before it would display in file explorer.

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

This has made my old Desktop viable as a Retro Gaming Console. My old HDD would take 10 minutes to launch windows and get everything read, then there were some games it just couldnt run because the Disk would be at 100% capacity. This SSD launches windows and has it ready in under 3 minutes, and can run games I couldnt play before. Im pretty sure it would be faster if my 2008 Asus Motherboard werent so archaic.

Silicon Power is LITERALLY the ONLY brand I buy. Why? When I used to work at my last Computer Repair Shop, I would see LOTS of Hard Drives coming in for upgrade/cloning over to SSD. What I also saw was that there were a lot of these off-brand SSDs that customers would buy from who knows where, and sure enough, they typically failed at about an 80% fail rate of at least the first attempt of cloning/migrating over the OS from the HD to the SSD. What brand, didnt fail? The only brand I ever had not to fail on the first migration/cloning attempt was Silicon Power (SP). The cool thing about SP is that they have great deals usually, so the price is never a concern when Im shopping for another SSD. Also, they hook you with FREE software to take care of your cloning/data transfer needs. Just register the SSD drive on their website located on the back of the packaging. Enter the code they ask you for and boom! You get the download link. I would Highly Recommend Silicon Power. Hope this helps someone make up their mind that may be shopping for a new SSD drive, whether you are upgrading or just adding to your setup....Go With Silicon Power!

My 4 stars are because Ive had a 2TB SSD have performance issues, after using for a couple of weeks - I believe due to internal heating. Amazon accepted the return and the replacement has been perfect - it happens. I would not hesitate to by Silicon Power storage devices in the future as my experience with them has been good.

Went quite smooth with help of the free cloning and backup tools they provide. Laptop is running like a Cheetah now.

It isnt the best performing thing out there, but it sure is a heck of a lot better than the HDD it replaced. Would recommend this brand if you need quick and cheap SSDs that are likely to perform acceptably.