 So we're on Aliexpress looking for bizarre components for an upcoming project and we stumble across a series of really cheap SSDs from a company called KingSpec Which kind of sounds like a knockoff of Kingston and this raised a couple of questions for us. One How can they be cheaper than massive multinationals like Samsung or Micron who enjoy the industry's best economies of scale? How would something like this perform and Perhaps most importantly should anyone trust what is probably the most valuable aspect of their computer their data? to a relatively unknown player oh Oh and one more question. Have you ever heard of our sponsor glasswire? Glasswire lets you see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device Use offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link below First things first the on paper specifications which getting our hands on was Actually, not as easy as you might think so the official page lists neither the controller So that's effectively the brain of an SSD that controls how data is managed on the NAND flash Nor the exact type of NAND flash that was used by this drive Furthermore when we cross referenced whatever data was out there in the wild often on third-party sites We actually found a ton of conflicting information everything from different NAND types MLC versus TLC to Wildly swinging sequential read and write ranges in some cases We actually found conflicting information within the same page now We were able to determine at least that the controller on our particular unit was probably a DRAM-less model from Maxio tech which is jmicrons SSD division that was spun off into a separate entity and that it's probably an NK 8 1 1 5 But we decided to leave confirming it until all the testing was complete Just in case our autopsy found that the patient was deceased due to the autopsy Okay, so for those of us who are not quite up to speed on what makes an SSD tick Aside from the like you plug it in and it makes the loading look faster And why being DRAM-less is important. Here's a quick primer When your operating system sends a write request to an SSD it actually assumes Even though it's 2018 that it is talking to a hard drive and sends data in a logical block address or LBA form now SSDs They don't do LBA Instead storing data in blocks which each contain four kilobyte pages So that's where the flash Translation layer inside the SSD comes in it converts LBA requests into actual block and page addresses Acting as sort of a table of contents What's more each NAND cell has a finite number of times that it can be overwritten So there needs to be logic inside the SSD that takes care to spread out the ware evenly This is a process known as ware leveling further complicating this process though an Individual page cannot be erased from a block So to remove part of the data from one block the whole block has to be moved over to a second one Minus the pages containing parts of the file that are marked for deletion Once that's done the first block can be marked as safe to overwrite now this consolidation Or moving around is known as garbage collection and SSDs have at least Seven percent of their true capacity hidden sometimes more in order to help shuffle data around This is otherwise known as over provisioning Now as you can imagine as an SSD gets more filled up with data this garbage collection process Gets more difficult because the fewer spare blocks you have the harder it is to organize the ones that remain Especially during heavy use when it has to perform this shuffling on the fly This is where not having a DRAM cache can hurt you remember that table of contents we talked about Ideally that gets stored on the cache So then without a fast way to look up where what goes Writing data to a DRAMless SSD ends up being kind of like going to the mall without a directory And then imagine you're in a hurry like you're doing random writes of small files all over the drive Which actually happens a lot during regular usage or or does it so let's look at some performance here No, oh oh Lordy oh oh wow oh oh the humanity Sorry, okay enough of that. Let's actually look a little closer at those numbers in Sequential reads and writes from a clean state everything here actually looks fine But the same can be said of an SD card and when we ran Windows on one of those recently the results were Well less than ideal, but where our Kingsbeck SSD falls flat on its face is where small size transfers come in So we're talking being beat by an order of two and a half times in some cases and then embarrassingly enough This model we're comparing it to right here is also a cashless model this time from Corsair So it seems to be a mix of the who knows what NAND and the cheap-ass controller Along with an unexceptional firmware, and that is with the drives empty and trimmed This situation can only get worse as the drive fills up Game level load times could be seen as a redeeming quality those are fine But honestly by this stage of our testing they just aren't enough for Kingspec to be getting any kind of recommendation for this drive especially given the mixed Amazon reviews that are either basically yay works great or died quickly no response from the RMA team with someone even going as far as to set up a complaints page about Kingspec The final nail in the coffin is the price so our no-name SSD is cheap Sure at the time we ordered it it was the cheapest 512 gig that we could find But cheap is not the same thing as good value so given that something like a Samsung 860 evo can be had for complete with five-year warranty by the way about $10 more then I guess the conclusion is this I Recommend the Kingspec p3 512. I strongly recommend it as a gift for someone you don't like Speaking of things I recommend as a gift although in this case for someone you really like Mass drops Sennheiser HD 6xx headphones. This is one of Massdrop's all-time bestsellers and Why wouldn't it be over 40,000 of their members have picked these things up to date and people continue to want them It uses the legendary HD 650 drivers as a base to deliver a balanced mid-range and natural sounding base It's got a detachable six-foot cable instead of the ten-foot cable on the original This is based on the community's feedback and it comes with support from Sennheiser So check out the link below to join the drop today So thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button But if you liked it hit like get subscribed Maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like This one and our community forum, which you should definitely join To be clear we're not really recommending this one either. We're just saying this one is really bad