512GB Teamgroup AX2 3D NAND 2.5" SATA Internal Solid State Drive EXPIRED

This a DRAMless disk. Not knocking on the deal, but putting it into perspective. Price wise, dram-less disks go lower than disks with RAM.

Quote from pelo : This a DRAMless disk. Not knocking on the deal, but putting it into perspective. Price wise, dram-less disks go lower than disks with RAM.

I think you're asking too much at this price point if you're disappointed that it's DRAMless. It's a bargain basement SSD.

I just care more whether it is reliable, I do not want to lost my data just because I picked a discount disk.

Good deal for raspberry pi. Much faster than SD card

Quote from nicessgg : I just care more whether it is reliable, I do not want to lost my data just because I picked a discount disk.

Personally wouldn't trust this for critical data. It's more for a backup to a backup

Can i use this to upgrade ps4 hard drive?

YMMV but I bought this the last time it went on sale, the drive failed in less than a week. Returned it and paid a couple more bucks for the micro center brand one.

Quote from vietn95 : YMMV but I bought this the last time it went on sale, the drive failed in less than a week. Returned it and paid a couple more bucks for the micro center brand one.

I guess you "lucked out" that it failed during return period

There has been alot of talk about Dram, SLC and dramless. If you already know what this means then skip this or add to anything I might have messed up on.

SSD's originally came out in SLC form which means each cell had it's own controller and you could write 1 byte at a time and it would just write to that cell. The problem is that this makes the SSD VERY expensive because every single cell needed a controller. Later came MLC then TLC now we have QLC.

SLC = 1 cell, 1 controller
MLC = 2 cells, 1 controller
TLC = 3 cells, 1 controller
QLC = 4 cells, 1 controler

(BTW What I am calling the controller basically is the read/write circuit so if you had to write 1 byte of data with SLC you only wrote the one byte. With QLC you have to write all four cells at the same time. This takes a longer time and slows down the writes and also makes the SSD wear a bit faster as you are sometimes writing data that did not need to be written to.)

So to speed up the writes once MLC/TLC/QLC hit, they started adding RAM to act as a buffer to speed up the writes. This cost more money but could really help make an SSD faster as long as what you were writing fit in the buffer.

So in the quest to get cheap and knowing that most people do not know or care about buffers or MLC or QLC, they started coming out with really cheap TLC and QLC SSD's that had no buffers and used cheaper and older controller tech. They were still faster than traditional hard drives and so what if they crapped out in 2-3 years instead of 5-8 years?

The reason I am writing all of this is that DRAM less SSD's are fine for data storage. Reading from an SSD is free... IE reads to not wear out an SSD, only writes do. So putting a game on a cheap SSD might be a bit slower but it will not normally wear out an SSD for most types of games.

The issue is using a cheap DRAMless SSD as a boot drive. NEVER NEVER do this!

Your boot drive is constantly writing small amounts of data to the drive and the DRAM will buffer this and then write to the drive in larger chunks and not constantly. Now I know many of you will say that you have been using a cheap DRAMless SSD as a boot for years but let me ask you this question....

Is the $20 you save really worth the risk on using one of these as your boot drive? Here are the technical details if you want to read up on it.

https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com...flash.html

P.S. There is a third type of SSD you will read about and this is the DRAMless SLD drive. Basically they stick a small amount of fast SLC on a SSD without DRAM and while this is better than having nothing, you really do not save much IMHO

Quote from jrb531 : There has been alot of talk about Dram, SLC and dramless. If you already know what this means then skip this or add to anything I might have messed up on.

Nice write up. Thanks

Is the plain Vulcan series the only one Team group has with dram? Looks like they only have other slc cache models on Amazon.

Quote from doboy007 : Personally wouldn't trust this for critical data. It's more for a backup to a backup

I wouldn't trust any drive for "critical data." Back up your stuff off your computer if you care about not losing it.

It also should be mentioned, some companies do some clever things with their controllers that the Dram doesn't matter. Look at crucial BX series for example. It's still a far better drive than a Kingston ssd which is also dramless. But Kingston and crucial are gonna be reliable. Where as other groups like team group, inland, pny, sandisk etc, they have to cut corners. It's pretty easy to see how easy and quickly they run out of steam.

You can use crystal disk info and run the random read write test. But increase it to 5-10gb. And watch the read writes plummet.

Another test that can be done to test the possible speed, reliability and durability of an ssd is to download a very large file, a video file that's 5-10gb, maybe make one yourself with a video editing program or upload it from your iPhone. Transfer and copy it from one folder to another. And at some point, especially the cheaper drives, watch the read writes go from 400+ down to 40-80mbps and even slower.

One thing that I will say, I have tested this on various drives and I observed inland, pny, sandisk and Kingston come to a crawl on this test. The crucial BX series did not come to a crawl. It kept up with the MX series almost as long. I haven't tested any Samsung drives or their QVO but I think there's a reason why they have a good reputation in the industry so we don't have to question them