 Okay, this thing is really weird you guys like it looks like a regular old Oh, there we go m.2 SSD, but not only can you glue one of these to one of these but you can actually have it show up as a single drive of up to 32 terabytes and They also claim that built into this thing. They've got SLC flash you guys remember SLC one cell equals one bit super fast super reliable and Super expensive but at a price of just three hundred and thirty dollars Just what kind of scam are these guys trying to pull here? I don't know But I know our sponsor Ridge Wallet isn't pulling any scams Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID Blocking plates check out how they can keep your wallet bulge down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping When I say SSD and modus probably isn't the first word to pop into your mind But chances are that you have heard of them before even if it was indirectly their fuse drive tiered storage software was actually licensed by AMD as the first version of their store my rain feature for Ryzen and Threadripper and This as far as I can tell is their first consumer hardware offering an SSD. That's Also called fuse drive. They say it's two SSDs in one and runs with artificial intelligence that gives it endurance as good as a Samsung 970 Pro which You smell that Kind of smells like grade-a marketing to me I mean it's challenging enough to put one SSD in a package this size let alone two and We can clearly see from the PCB layout and the markings on the dies that this is just a regular vanilla QLC SSD with a single controller on it Except maybe it's not The big reason why adding layers causes endurance to drop is because of the voltages required to write to each layer But what most people don't realize is that? Multi-level NAND can be used in a single level mode where only a single layer of each cell is actually used at a time now it cuts the capacity of QLC to 1 quarter, but it also offers nearly the same speed and Nearly the same endurance of native SLC this concept is nothing new though and large vendors like Intel or Samsung have actually been using this SLC mode to cache their drives and improve performance for years now But here's the new idea most SSDs that use SLC mode caching use a dynamically sized cache rather than Dedicating a chunk of the SSD for it and a non tech reports that Intel 660p for example starts out with 76 gigabytes of SLC cache But then that can go as low as just 6 gigs as the drive fills up that means that it will sacrifice over time both the performance and Endurance that it was supposed to gain from the SLC cache so back to in modus's marketing claims Then they're taking a different approach by creating a permanently segmented one and a half terabyte QLC SSD with a separately addressable 128 gig SLC portion I didn't put a graphics card in here one moment, please Man I love how unhappy the D drive is you know what I'm saying. It's so upset Hey the performance looks alright though. It's rated for 3470 megabytes per second reads, and it's just Shy of that and rated for 3,000 megabytes per second writes, which is fine. Just fine for a QLC SSD Wait no that's really good for QLC now those numbers are much better than what you'd expect writing to QLC flash That is the range that I would expect as long as the SLC cache is working correctly because that is way better Than what we would see writing to in particular QLC flash in QLC mode Compared to our PCI Express Gen 4 TLC boot drive though these numbers don't look that impressive Even with and modus's SLC caching what they also have up their sleeve though is the ability to quickly and easily Extend the SSD volume with a hard drive So let's see how that looks you can see this illustrated when we compare to our PCI Express Gen 4 TLC boot drive read speeds thanks to the wider bus are way better on that one But write speeds because we're not taking advantage of an SLC cache actually kind of suck by comparison Theoretically this is as simple as plugging in a hard drive We then fire up in modus's fusion X software, and we're gonna make a non bootable fuse drive so our in modus SSD is our fast drive and Our Seagate hard drive is our slow drive. I mean I I guess we could do it the other way around But that would be very stupid. Oh hey here. It goes. Oh wow you can actually Untier it when you're done if you don't like it anymore for whatever reason that's cool truthfully I kind of expected the 128 gig SLC drive to appear separately in device manager, but it doesn't It's just permanently allocated to accelerate your one and a half terabyte SSD So in a way this is not dissimilar to when people used to manually Over-provision the flash in their drives for more consistent performance way back in the day before Trim and garbage collection had matured to the point that they have now. Oh It's done drive three is made up of drives two and one one plus two is three oh And so our Fuse drive all two tiers of it are totally invisible to me now And it just shows up as a twelve point three terabyte hard drive So we've got all the capacity of both, but they're combined. It's just like I don't know Let's just throw some let's throw some footage onto it or something okay? The SSD caching is definitely working what I want is to actually hit the hard drive I want to see this go down to like 200 megabytes a second Anthony says I won't be able to do it But I I see that as a challenge while this is running is actually a good time to bring up that you can run a configuration Like this as your boot drive so you can actually run windows off of this which as we've talked about numerous times in the past Is an ideal use case for this type of caching or tiering solution because your operating system Tends to hit the same files many many many times and then most of it can sit in cold or warm storage Only to be accessed infrequently, and that's exactly how this works Okay, I'm just gonna keep doing this Yeah, we're still well over two gigs a second You know what I was probably expecting to be able to break through it because most of the caching solutions that I've used before use much much smaller SSDs, but I mean even though it's QLC flash It's much faster than a hard drive so being able to write to I mean a terabyte and a half of SSD means you would It would come up, but you would basically never actually see that hard drive like speed Maybe the first time you load up. You know call of duty if you haven't played it in a year You know you would have to actually pull the whole thing from hard drive But then it should promote that data into the SSD so the next time you fire it up It's quick one of the dangers however of using a NAND based storage device like an SSD as a cache is that a right? cache well by its very nature gets written to far more frequently than a drive that you're just using normally because you write to it once when you write the data to the Combined drive and then if that data gets demoted it gets replaced with something else And then if that data gets demoted it gets replaced with something else and then if it gets promoted back into the cache you write That same data again that can be really problematic but and modus says that with their gold endurance they manage to somehow dramatically outperform the mere 600 program erase cycles that their QLC NAND is Rated for I mean how can they claim with a straight face that their drive is good for something like three? Times the endurance that Samsung advertises for their shiny new 980 Pro. I mean We looked at it. This is a fairly bog standard Fizen controller QLC SSD well it turns out this data is kind of a Your mileage may vary situation and modus says that hot data That is frequently accessed spends a lot more of its time in that SLC portion than on the warm QLC layer so unlike traditional SLC caching where storage from the whole drive is used for in-flight writes And then they just flush out the cache when it's idle and modus is using a dedicated eight channel NAND chip and their tiering mechanism Activates on right so writes are immediately done on SLC Then they're only moved out when they haven't been modified in a while that actually helps prevent wear on the QLC layers now for something Like our black magic cameras where we put m.2 SSDs into USB enclosures And then can write as much as the entire drive in a single session there'd be next to no benefit from this approach but for a desktop user who's not likely to routinely write hundreds of gigabytes of data or When they do it might be a program or game that they're also going to be you know playing and using frequently for a bit Starting to make a lot of sense and that's exactly who in modus says they're marketing these drives for for the time being they're only Available directly from in modus, but they're hoping to partner with system integrators in the future So bottom line it's always a balancing act you've got your price you got your performance, and you've got your endurance Pick two but and modus thinks they've got that sweet spot that comes closest to picking all three and They actually even put RGB on it even though we never did turn that on you do of course give up a little of each of those Things to get this kind of balance though, so what do you guys think is it worth it? One thing I know is worth it is subscribing on floatplane for that sweet behind-the-scenes content Madison did a an office tour that was very Her style for sure. I'm sorry. I did make you look bad. I did I didn't mean to and it's also worth checking out our sponsor ting thanks to ting mobile for sponsoring today's video They've got new rates that make it easier than ever to see how much you can save by switching to ting Unlimited talk and text is just ten dollars and data plans started at 15 with unlimited data for forty five dollars a month And if you liked their previous pay for what you use plans. They're still there They're just called ting flex plans, and they charge just five dollars a gig Data can also be shared if you have a family plan so you can connect more phones to save more and you'll get the same Nationwide coverage in the US and award-winning customer service that you remember pretty much any phone will work with ting So check them out at linus.ting.com and you can get a 25 dollar credit towards your account If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out one of our previous videos exploring the concept of SSD or Optane caching on slower spinning rust Really is cool stuff enterprise storage concepts in your gaming PC