Speed on the cheap: TOP 5 inexpensive SSD drives

The Patriot Burst is one of the most affordable (if not the most affordable) SSDs on the market. Cost is a very good motivator to buy, so the only thing that this SSD needs to be successful is not to fail in terms of speed.

And with this he is completely in order. The manufacturer claims about 40,000 IOPS for writing and 50,000 IOPS for reading. This indicator affects how the speed changes when copying data arrays consisting of a large number of small files. 40 and 50 thousand is not, though not a record, but quite a decent result for this price category. Drives with 70 - 80 thousand IOPS usually cost a couple of times more.

The control chip is Phison PS3111-S11, a controller popular in the low-cost segment, which allows the drive to demonstrate speeds of up to 560 MB / s when reading and up to 542 MB / s for writing. A separate buffer memory chip is not provided, 32 MB is integrated into the controller itself.

Plus, Patriot gives the drive a standard three-year warranty along with a decent Warranty Life (TBW) of 75TB. This figure means the total amount of information that can be guaranteed to be rewritten to this module. Thanks to the combination of these factors, Patriot Burst regularly receives recommendations to buy in reviews.

ADATA seems to have followed in the footsteps of Corsair 's multi-stationers and has been releasing dozens of drives of various classes and types in recent years. On the company's website, you can now find almost two dozen diverse SSDs, which allows you to respect the brand's products.

Specifically, the A-Data SU650 model is a rather interesting option for a low-cost SSD with excellent value for money. This drive uses a low-cost Silicon Motion SM2258 controller, which boasts TLC direct write mode, low heat and an affordable price.

The amount of 3D TLC NAND memory is 128 GB. Of these, 111.79 GB is available to the user, and the rest forms the service area and is used by the controller firmware to store the repeater table, checksums, and other things.

According to the passport, the disk provides a write speed of 320 MB / s and a read speed of up to 520 MB / s. Pretty good for a $30 price tag. If we forget about the price tag and look for cons, then perhaps the only weakness of the disk will be the low reading speed of 4K blocks of 20 thousand IOPS. Because of this, the speed will decrease when copying archives consisting of many small files.

The BX500 SSD, released under the wing of the Micron Technology Crucial sub-brand, is aimed at undemanding users who plan to upgrade the hard drive in a PC or laptop, but do not want to spend too much money. The BX500 is made in a 2.5-inch SATA 3 form factor, and it is based on 3D NAND TLC memory chips, which have recently successfully settled in the low-cost sector.

Despite the low-cost, according to the manufacturer, the emphasis in the production of the drive was placed on speed. So, according to the passport, the “straightforward” write and read speed is not at all budgetary 500 and 540 MB / s, while the popular Crystal Disk Info benchmark gives 499 and 560 MB / s.

Naturally, with the official price of $ 30, it was impossible to do without tightened belts. In the case of the BX500, the bottleneck is the low-cost single-core SM2258XT controller without support for buffer RAM, which affects the write speed. When copying a large number of files of different sizes, the disc recording performance can drop noticeably and fluctuate between 125 - 366 Mb / s.

The BX500 comes with a three-year warranty, during which 40 TB of information can be written to the disc, after which the official warranty expires. At the end of 2018, these are not the most impressive numbers, as many manufacturers now provide a stock of 70-80 TB with the same three-year warranty.

Transcend was one of the first to attempt to combine the performance and durability of MLC SSD memory with the enticing price tags of TLC SSD drives. In the 230TS, this commitment is reflected in the affordable yet capable SM2258 controller, which supports dynamic SLC cache, LDPC ECC error correction algorithms, and TRIM and DevSleep support. Such a set made it possible to smooth out the shortcomings of Micron's three-dimensional memory, which has capacious, but not too fast cores.

The Transcend 230TS boasts high write and read speeds (300 MB/s and 560 MB/s according to the passport), but when loaded with random reads, it behaves like many other low-cost models based on TLC 3D NAND. This is mainly expressed in a drop in the speed of linear recording by 2 - 3 times when the size of the SLC buffer is exhausted. But here, as they say, don't shoot the pianist, he plays as best he can.

The disadvantages of the model include the missing thermal pad on the controller. If there are problems with cooling or air extraction in the case of a computer or laptop, the 230TS can become quite warm under prolonged loads.

Overall, when compared to current low-cost SSDs, rather than last year's mid-range models (Transcend released it in the spring of 2017), the 230TS deserves a high rating. Plus, it has a high TBW of 91TB, which twice the TBW of some low-cost models. Considering the $40 price tag, this SSD is in every way a great option for speeding up the system.

At the time of release in 2017, the Intel 545s was positioned as a mid-range product. However, after the gradual reduction in the cost of SSD on TLC NAND, this model gradually moved into the category of state employees. Now it is an excellent candidate for the role of a system drive in a home PC, work laptop or office computer with a small amount of daily disk operations.

As the basis of the hardware platform of the drive, a 4-channel Silicon Motion SM2259 controller and proprietary 64-layer Intel 3D TLC NAND memory are used. This combination provides high read and write speeds - 550 and 440 MB / s, respectively. Together with fast data access time (80 thousand write IOPS, 70 thousand read IOPS), this allows you to raise the performance of the disk subsystem of any personal computer or laptop to a fairly high level.

Due to the fact that the Intel 545s was originally in the middle price segment, it got a few goodies that are not inherent in low-cost SSDs. For example, the drive supports Intel Rapid Start and Smart Response technologies. The first allows the disk to almost instantly bring the computer out of deep sleep, and the second improves the interaction of the disk array, allowing you to use the SSD as a cache for the HDD. Plus, Intel gives the disk an official five-year warranty against the standard three-year one.