This is kind of a previously unfulfilled niche of content, in depth and quality reviews and tips centered around actually low cost gear with good production quality. Many channels either pass on the cheap stuff altogether, or they have terrible video and audio, no script, and rarely give you any more information than what it says on the packaging.

Well done! Thoroughly informative as well as entertaining with a great video atmosphere overall. Its important to note that the existence of a DRAM cache (as in the Adata drive) will increase the longevity of the SSD, as it reduces the overall wear of the flash memory cells. I look forward to seeing this channel grow, keep up the great work!

Like your honesty. I've been building PC systems for about 26 years now but I really don't know a lot of computer/tech engineering stuff except for the absolute basics - yup, I'm still a hobbyist. My first computer was an Amiga 500 and I learned how to modify it with LOTS of help from user groups, BBSs and IRC channels. KZfaq wasn't a thing yet back then. Later when I really wanted to build my own PC, I took a PC Repair correspondence course, read a beginner's guide on building PCs and made friends with a local computer repair shop owner who helped me pick my components for my first build and steer me towards resources I would never had thought of - dumpsters outside of other computer repair shops known to throw out older yet completely good parts such as slightly outdated monitors, cables, brackets etc. I bought ALL my major necessary parts new from my friend and he stood by me every step of the way till my PC was up and running. He was honest like you. He was a former electrical engineer and computer specialist for our local major university but was always patient and kind, humble to a fault. Now after 15 odd builds I'm still itching for my next, new build. Thanks for being here and providing good, thought provoking content.

You and your channel are absolutely going places, without a doubt, dude. Simply fantastic stuff!

Thanks for the data, and a good video. I've used mainly Kingston small SSDs, and agree that they are great for making an older system feel more usable without much cost involved. I also use them as OS drives in home servers, where even after years of updates they use less an 10GB.

Dude, fantastic work here brother. As someone who does video editing and has published content to youtube occasionally on another channel, I know the amount of work that went into this entire project. It shows your dedication to your passion and perseverance towards your craft. Keep up the work man! Looking forward to what comes next!

I work on old computers all the time and I love these smaller capacity ssds due to the cost/performance and the fact that most of my clients don’t do many local tasks now a days as most applications just need a web browser. Also great video! Love the editing style!

I had a A400 brick after short use. There are methods to try to unbrick them, but I did not pursue it. It soured me on this part of the Kingston lineup. Thanks for the testing. Your method seemed reasonable to me.

I use a lot of smaller SSDs in project similar to what you described. Appreciated this vid. Thanks so much.

This is the first time one of your videos has shown up on my YT homepage. Nice production value and worthwhile content for the layman/casual user. Good luck with your channel.

Lower capacity SSDs are incredibly useful! I plop them into all kinds of systems. And these SSDs are so friggin' cheap! My last pizza delivery cost more than an SSD, and the pizza didn't last anywhere near as long. Good experiment, BTW. I've been using ADATA exclusively for my small capacity drive needs.

These smaller SSDs definitely still have their place. I recently got one and use it as a boot drive for my TrueNAS box. I am also thinking of getting another to replace the old mechanical HD in an old laptop to give it some extra life. Since I only use that laptop for business related stuff like writing proposals, posting things online, etc. it works perfectly.

SSDs are such cool technology. I love watching any videos on them.

This guy is awesome cos he legit goes about his videos with the research process in mind very simple explanations leading up to a comprehensive analysis explanation. This guy is awesome please don't change. I like his process of explanation he doesn't talk too fast and that helps with comprehension Keep the good work flowing dude

your editing is great hope you get more subs cause you deserve them :)

Awesome video, keep them coming!

In reality even when the sp drive is at high capacity and is running slower, it is substantially faster then a mechanical drive. I've used 6 of them so far with no problems.

Amazing content in this video and the channel overall. Also, a video like this but concerning RAM, GPUs and CPU would be amazing for people building it's own rigs.

For Servers, Raspbery Pis and many other scenarios the cheap 120GB 2.5" SSDs are more than sufficient, I have roughly 8 of these SSDs laying around and in use. Great Review thanks a lot, was fun to watch.

I have several Adata and Silicon Power drives in various sizes. They might not be the fastest out there but they have been reliable.As I have upgraded, I put them into external USB cases. They're handy to keep around

Just come across this channel and the content is superb! I personally like the silicone power drives.

Glad you didn't include the PNY CS900, I've seen first hand major inconstant results in their SSDs. Cool video!

I do tons of pc and laptop upgrades. Ppl don't need or want to spend for bigger hd. This waa something i always wanted to do. I use Kingston because you can always get them and its a name brand. Way to go on being honest. Doing videos and things like this is how you learn.

Glad to see these results. I always buy Adata for cheap SSDs. I bought one Silicon Power when they were on sale at Newegg a year ago and it was fine, but Adata is my go-to. Always had good results with them.

Banger. Best vid so far. Keep it up.

Installed a few silicon power SSD in a few builds. No issues after a few year. I will look into the adata in the future for sure.

A little sad to see the Kingston A400 couldn't make the list. I've used 5 of the 240GB model in several PC builds for friends and myself. I've only just upgraded to an nvme boot drive after 2 years. Great video again

I've put around 500 silicon powers in customer computers. Always a great upgrade to keep 4-10 year old computers moving at almost the same speed as new computers.

I find ssd and the technology behind it interesting so that’s why I have a couple of MLC enterprise grade ssds, one of them has a 1.65TB capacity (pcie 4x) and a rated TBW of 9PBW! I got lucky and it was at 93% health so it is great for a storage drive (no nvme). In case you’re wondering, it is the Fusion-io scale2 pcie ssd (1.65tb)

Great video and beneficial information. I like to use these cheapos to test Linux distros on a real drive before committing to a larger drive for a complete system. I like doing that better than a virtual drive, as I can see what real hardware will do on a system. Concerning my experience, I can echo your findings with ADATA, which I think is worth the extra $4. I have also had a good experience with the Silicone Power. I have recently purchased some Inland drives, but it is too soon to render a judgment, and I have only used a Lexar once, so that one I also don't have enough experience with to give an opinion. I like having some of these cheaper drives on hand as people will sometimes give me their old Windows 7 computers which I can recondition with Linux and give to kids and people who just need something to use for everyday computing. It saves these old machines from being thrown in the trash, and putting in a cheap SSD gives them more power than a Chromebook.

Absolutely fantastic video! Once I had finished the video I checked your sub count and my god was I surprised. You deserve a lot more! You've earned a sub from me, well done!

This was a decent primer on the bargin-basement tier! Have a sub! :)

Great video, very informative. Thank you for posting it.

New subber; loving your content. Suggestion for next time: take note of each drive's warranty and TBW (TB written) rating. SSD cells have a limit to the # of times they can be written to, so that affects its usuable lifespan. Warranty is often tied to this (e.g., x years or ### TBW, whichever comes first). I have found similarly priced SSDs (and M.2 NVMe) with similar advertised specs that vary significantly with warranty and TBW. For example, some had 5 yr warranty and a TBW of 200 times to drive's size, yet another brand had 3 yr and a TBW of 600x drive size. This definitely influenced my purchasing decisions based on use case.

What a beautiful video, I wish more people would cover budget pc computer parts so we finally know who the reliable cheap brands are, however I know these videos are expensive so bigger channels need to step up too

I love tiny disks like these. I use them in my main machine in much the same way I used floppies in the 90s (via IcyDocks) and also as system disks for legacy gaming rigs (via IcyDocs & SATA to IDE adapters). Inexpensive and perfect for these use cases. :)

Nice review. Your voice is something man !

Nice content delivery

I've had my Adata SU800 128GB SSD for almost 5yrs now and still kicking in life, back then ssd's were more expensive than now but it was the best investment I've ever made.

It's nice to see videos about sata ssd's ..most channels only talk about nvme

I’m a huge fan of the Inland drives and they’re my go-tos when it comes to laptop hard drive replacement and rebuilding old office computers. Fun fact - add an ATA to SATA adapter to your XP-based Pentium III, Pentium 4, or Athlon that lacks SATA and you’ll get performance out of your machine you won’t believe.

I use smaller SSD drives in my Dell R720 Server's for boot OS. Replaced the DVD/CD drive with a caddy type that hold an SSD drive and boot from it. Works like a treat.

Thanks for all the hard work

I've been using Inland SSDs for years. Though I've hardly been thrashing them, they last just fine.

Thanks! I had a silicon power go DOA after a few days so avoided that brand since then but usually go for the cheap Chinese ones and try and find a dram cache for game drives... For boot drives I try and go for a brand like patriot or adata or get lucky with a crucial on sale!

Really great video man 🔥🔥👍👍

It's amazing that you can buy those things so cheap these days. I remember when they first came out and were the new "big thing" in computers. I think at that time I bought a 32GB hard drive for like $70 or something. 128GB was like the max size you could buy and they were like $300 or something. I don't remember the exact prices but something like that.

Dude your videos are so high quality

Thanks for doing this!

I have the Silicon Power A55 but the size is 128GB, in that additional 8GB I can store my OS Ubuntu. I used it for some time as boot drive and now I use it as SSD cache for my HDDs. I have it now for 4 or 5 years and I never had any complaint.

I've used cheap SP, TEAMGROUP, Lexar, and Inland SSDs in my desktops and, more specifically, in my servers. The only drives I've consistently had bad results with are the Lexars. The two that I had both died within 6 months and were basically only used to house the OS on my NAS. I think the final totals were less than 100 gigs written and maybe 1100 hours of being powered on when I chucked em. I replaced them with two TEAMGROUP drives and never once had another issue. I've honestly lost count at how many SP drives I have, some NVMe most SATA, and I've never had any issues with reliability. The only bad SP drive I've dealt with just needed a firmware update, which was actively noted on their support site when I visited the page for the drive I had to resolve the issue I was having, and that was 2 or 3 years ago at this point.

Great video! Though have you also tried a comparison with used but high health with DRAM and with high end brands (Samsung Intel Crucial/Micron Hynix)? I know that test would be much harder to run but I tend to lean towards those used drives than these brand new ones, especially because there is a selling tax for new items here, which makes the used products much more appealing. Those old high end SSDs also come in metal casing instead of plastic (The Kingston is the only one with metal casing I believe), which should help more in terms of cooling and longevity, despite the SSDs being older.

Wholesome SSD content.

The Inland brand SSD has done me well in the past few years while brands like SanDisk have failed on me months after purchasing and getting an RMA was a pain in the arse. I've bought high performance Inland NVMe drives that have high endurance and moderate speeds for both Gen 3 (Premium) and Gen4 (Perform) and both have onboard cache at lower prices than those of Samsung. The Gen 3 drive has been in my system for about 2 years now and going strong despite my PC being on for more than 10 hours a day with quite a few instances of 24 hour operation. A really good buy if you live near a Micro Center store.

Great video! I've seen the ADATA drives for sale but never decided to try one. I've installed several Silicon Power 512GB and 1TB drives and they've worked well. I'll try out an ADATA drive and see how well it works. :) Thanks for posting!

Love ur content! Keep it up!

Thanks for this very useful video.

Nice work. Definitely need a follow-up with the Kingston.

Really useful video. Thx!

Really interesting. Thanks for sharing 👍👍

Fantastic video. Microcenter has Inland 128 and 240 GB SSDs, so I have quite a few of those for linux experiments and such. No failures yet, but I don't torture them either.

I use plenty of 120-256gb drives in small projects here. For example, to try out different OSes on laptops. I also use a 120gig for my pfsense firewall, they'd probably be great for a HTPC as well if you're just streaming video and audio from a NAS. A 120gig would probably be overkill for something like ArcaOS or Haiku too.

Looking forward to the results, I need an SSD for my OG Xbox and I don’t wanna spend 50 bucks just for a console mod

My first SSD was a ADATA and the second one was Kingston. Both were 32G, that was a good size back then. The Kingston started to wear (long boot times, random BSOD) after not even 6 moths under Windows 7, (8GDDR3, core I5 laptop) and swapped it with a mechanical HDD. ADATA was keeping up very well under Windows XP (some Intel dual core with 2G DDR2) and after almost one year installed Slackware on it. It still works like a champ today, after more than 10 years. The Kingston one, died under Linux completely; I don't used swap partition on either SSD. Since then, my go-to brand of SSD is ADATA. I tried Kingston some time ago and again, it failed, while ADATA showed no wear on the same PC under the same conditions. I don't know, maybe I had bad luck?

here in indonesia, our "budget" 128gb SSD choices are priced at around 15$, with many brands you will never heard of, like RX7, NCT, valuetech, flyjiie, kingsmax and there are still more of em. maybe more comparison vs those legit brands like the above will be cool

Great video. It would be nice to see their TBW though. Nearly all the TBW tests usually run for high capacity well-known brands.

First of all, I love the Intro POST splash screen. Also, when my grandma downloads Ransomware, where will she store it. You know 128GB is going to be over faster than my data cap.

I have four of the Kingston drives. Two 120, one 240 and a 500gb. All work great for years. For the price they're hard to beat. But I'll try an adata next time. Dram would help a lot with big files.

Superb reciew

I bought four of the Silicon Power A55 SSDs, and each of them suffered a drastic reduction in write speed after less than 3 months' use. Initially, they worked fine, with Crystal DiskMark scores very similar to your report. The read and write speeds were around 400 MB/s. But after 3 months or so, the write speeds were under 100 MB/s. A couple of them had write speeds of around 15 MB/s, significantly slower than a hard drive. I was using these drives as storage, not the boot drive, and what apparently triggered the slowdown was when I copied the entire contents of a different drive to the SP all at once. The file transfer went well for the first 300 GB or so, then drastically slowed down. Afterwards, I tried deleting the partition and re-formatting the drive, but the write slowdown did not change, even when the drive was empty. The large file transfer appears to have permanently damaged the drive's write speed. I've done similar large file transfers using other brands of SSD and not had this problem with any other brand. I do not recommend the SP A55 drives.

Fair and honest review ....we don't need high tech info just the stuff that matters..nice video enjoyed ..

New SUB, really entretainment video!, gj

I've been very satisfied with the balance of performance and cost with ADATA products in general.

Actually just built a NAS using an Inland 128gb and an old PC I had lying around. Running TrueNas using one of your video tutorials.... lol. Have 8Tb with 4Tb of parity. Actually kind of glad I went for Inland. A couple of reasons include I live near a Microcenter, it is their in house brand. And I got it sub 20$ on sale. Another is it's fairly middle to higher placing on the charts in all of the scenarios. Which lend to it being a bit more versatile. So not to bad even without a dram cache.

i came on this video its 1year ago and iam going to buy a Adata su650 thanks it was very informative

Adata is a good brand, thank you for testing it for me before I buy it

These 128gb drives are awesome as an external boot drive when paired up with Ventoy. I literally can boot from any of 12 different ISO files and there is plenty of room to add more. This comes in handy when installing Windows 10, 11 Server 2012, 2019 etc... At the same time I have multiple Linux distros at my fingertips to check out as a live version and can install to another drive in a system at will. I am not affiliated with Ventoy - I just love the software and you should check it out if you get a chance

Results scale with size, and yes the lexar seems to retain consistent when full which is interesting.

Wish you had tried any of the Netac drives, I've had some good read/writte speed with them, and they've been very reliable.

Secondhand ssds are also an option if you want to go cheap! For the last ten years, ssds have become much more resistant to wear, so it's not as risky as people tend to say anymore.. also nice that it avoids a little e-waste

Brilliant video.

I play around a lot with these drives due to Raspberry pi4 that I have. I have a bunch of these but never tested them. Thanks for doing my homework.

v helpful thank you!

You should also be looking at the lifecycle of the drives, the manufactures usually supply that info. Also how long their warranty is, will give you an idea of the expected lifespan of the device.

I just buy refurbished big name branded ssds on ebay for pennies for small projects, usually the sellers list the health but it's always a gamble. Paid off a lot of times for me. I've been using brand new Kingston drives on my own builds for years and haven't had one die yet.

My experience with Kingston is great, best budget drive in canada for resellers

Interesting test results. The one thing I need to say about SSDs is they should not be referred to as Drives but rather Storage Devices. A drive is a device with mechanical elements built into it, mainly the spinning disk and its related components for reading and writing. 🙂

Hi Hardware Haven! Just a thought, you should put Amazon affiliate links of the products in the description. That way if someone buys the product(no extra cost to them) using that link you can get a small kickback from it! And honestly you deserve it for making this great video!

I can echo your findings on the Kingston drives. I used to work at a place where a lot of cheap, small SSDs were purchased and I found the Silicon Power drives to be the best all rounders, and the Kingston drives the most failure prone. I didn't get any AData drives as we were pinching every penny.

Loving this music

❤I would love to see a updated best bang for your buck ssds in the 1/2-2 tb range- something for a mass games drive or something

I always use drives of this size, 1 smaller partition for windows, 1 larger for apps, mostly portable ones, plus net stuff like browsers. I then add other large mechanical drives, 1 for games, 1 for TV and films.

Great video

vouch for the inland professional 120gb. I bought one 4 years ago and it's still going strong as a windows test bench drive, with no noticable slow downs

Thank you for the benchmarks. Seems Adata, though slower than advertised...seems to be the best of lot in this budget category. File that away.

About SSD: I recently discovered a nice little SATA 2 M.2 enclosure (for about 40$) that lets you add two M.2 (SATA) SSDs with RAID1 in one 2.5" case - that should easily be the smallest Hardware Raid available right now - pretty cool for booting servers - it gives you redundancy with low power consumption, it only uses one external sata port but still gives you a raid. For example with your e350 Board you could use one of these and 3 standard 3.5" drives in Raid5-mode and get a decent backup server out of it.

I have that lexar one and its awesome

I tinker with old PCs running different linux distro's and some old macs. Having a pile of 120GB class SSDs is always useful

might want to compare the TBW rating as well and nand types

as a person who used SILICON POWER A55 250GB before, its really good tho, bought for only 24$ back then and it performs almost same as my Samsung gen3 m2 ssd in my laptop