 Everyone knows that compared to a hard drive, an SSD is a great way to speed up your system. But what everyone doesn't know is that unless your SSD has a DRAM cache built into it, like this one for example, it can actually end up being slower than a mechanical hard disk. So that's why in the past we've always avoided those $20 SSDs until now. Meet the Fatty Dove Racing 120 gig SSD. We purchased this sucker for 20 bucks. So who's the sucker? This sucker or this sucker? I know it shouldn't matter, but whenever I see really terrible branding, like to the point where you'd have had to be a child or an idiot to think that it makes any sense, it really does decrease my confidence in the finished product, you know? Why is there an overweight bird on the box for this package? What is it about this that screams racing? I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows. We're all just guessing. So let's talk through the specs here. This is a two and a half inch drive with an apparent 128 megabytes of DRAM cache. This is from the Amazon listing. The verbiage though is lifted straight from the Wikipedia entry for other solid-state drives. So it says DRAM based and cache on buffer. But the thing is the only other SSDs that we've seen at this price point are DRAM-less, used or or renewed. And as far as I can tell, this thing is totally brand new in box. So... We also have this that came in the package. Oh, service policy. Thank you for purchase of our items. We're so glad that you selected us in our products. We offer a five-year limited warranty. Love you! Dave, we got a SATA cable. That is actually a pretty good bonus. Most drives don't include a SATA cable anymore. So we need our data and our power. And is this just gonna boot right up for me, Anthony? If you press the power button, yeah. Well, yeah, minor details. You don't need to hit F8. Is this just a sticker? Sure is. So with the stickers on it, you get plus two years of warranty? I don't know. Sudden power off recovery. That to me indicates that it would have a capacitor on it, like an enterprise SSD. That's what it sounds like. It can't possibly have that. Also, I love this sentence right here. Thank you for selecting us. Good luck. So first test is what? Just initializing it? Yeah, we need to initialize it. New simple volume. Well, the capacity is as advertised. Now, there's some more problems here. This says serial ATA revision 2.6, but it also says it's SATA 6 gigabit per second and it said that on the drive as well. Yeah. So apparently it doesn't even support trim and and is SATA 2 according, well, depending on which spec you believe. Well, we'll know soon enough because Crystal Disk Mark will tell us exactly what kind of sequential speeds we can expect from this thing. You know, in some ways this like rando cheap hardware is far more interesting than the stuff from manufacturers that are reputable enough that you can trust what they say. Yeah. Okay. You never know what you're gonna get. Look at that. So it's SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second, even though there's information right on the box that would indicate that it's not. What? They put a dub on their packaging. So how how can we rely on them to know exactly what's in the box if they clearly had no idea what they were doing on the outside of it? Out of the gate, I'm actually kind of impressed. I mean saturating the SATA 3 6 gig per second interface has not been a feat for years and years at this point. But the thing is this is only a 120 gig SSD. So what's weird about that is that you know how higher capacities of a given SSD tend to be rated for more performance? The reason for that is that to get those higher capacities in some cases they'll put more NAND flash chips onto the PCB, which means that you get to take advantage of more parallelization as you're writing to the flash and reading from it, boosting your performance. Well, it's been years since 120 gig SSDs have made any sense to make because the capacities of the individual NAND flash chips have become so high that in order to even build a 120 gig SSD you only need like one chip on there and the performance would absolutely suck unless it's fine. Okay, so the Enigma deepens then. What did you have in mind for us next Anthony? Well, we could do the file copy test, but I did create some tests specifically for this in Linux. Okay, so I should restart? Yep. Alright, so hit me. Pop open two terminals and we'll run some scripts that I made. sudo.slash disk test. So that one then. That is the one. 111 gig SSD. Yeah, it does a security erase first. Now it's doing continuous looping of one gigabyte write and then one gigabyte read. Okay. And then it tells us what the latency is after a thousand writes of average. Oh, that took a lot longer already. Oh, it's going up. Oh boy. We went from 2.3 seconds to seven seconds already. The reads are still pretty consistent, but the writes have skyrocketed. This is TLC. Okay, that's fair. Alright. So the other one, do sudo file copy. F*** off. What? I swear to God, the way that WhatsApp sends you f***ing constant notifications that you're logged out. Dash P space, mount and hit enter. That all looks correct. And that'll show us then over here what our sequential read and writes look like, as well as especially the write latency. Got it. So that'll tell us how effective that DRAM cache is, as well as how effective the NAND is at being erased. This is interesting. So the read test is still taking about the same amount of time it was at the start, but we're getting spikes in the write test where it's jumping up to over 15 seconds. We just finished our first run of the sequential file copy test and it's getting warm now. And this is interesting. The read test is no longer finishing consistently in just two seconds. It's actually drawn almost level with the write test, which has gone down. The write latency though has gone up pretty significantly. Quintuple, or as much as 8x. It's all over the place. Okay. Does it have a DRAM cache? No, don't tell me. We'll find out after. So now what? Well, now we can graph those results, but we could also throw on one of our DRAM-less SSDs. Oh, let's do that. Let's see if that makes a difference. Okay. So reboot? Yeah. Oh wait, do you want to look at that output first? Yeah, you want to look at the output first? Ah, LTTStore.com. Oh, thank you. Did you really build that into this benchmark? I built many things into the benchmark that you have not seen yet. That moment when your program is like 90% Easter eggs, 10% copying files back and forth. Oh my god, Anthony. What? How do I shut it down? Do I do it the same way? Just go to leave? Leave. Why is it called leave? I mean, that's almost as stupid as Windows being start to turn it off. So just the same commands again? Same commands again. So we'll start with the A data drive. That is, I want to say similar, and then I can start this one? Yeah. Okay. Let's see what happens now. This product page is just going to be lies, right? Do you want to look at it? I mean, we've got some time. I'm pretty sure most of this is lifted either from Wikipedia or reviews of other unrelated SSDs. Single level cell cache technology? I don't think so. Definitely not. SLC hasn't been around even in the enterprise for many years. There's even conflicting information here. It takes 10 seconds from the start to the desktop. Fatty Dove 240 gigs, solid state drive starts up in about 15 seconds. They're this far away from each other. Optical storage read speed? What? What are you even talking about? Do we have a result here? No, not just yet. Not quite yet, but I think- But I'm pretty sure this is a DRAM-less SSD. Wait. It actually might not be. This ADATA is doing even worse. Wait, no. Better in latency, for the most part, but the actual test completion times are much worse. That actually would make some sense if the Fatty Dove only has a couple of chips in it. Thankfully, Fatty Dove is more resistant to shock and vibration. It can fly, but not quite fly. It just sort of falls slowly. I guess it's just like a chicken. Yeah, chickens can do that. Have you ever thrown a chicken? No. Fun fact, I actually had a pet chicken when I was a kid. Me too. The chicken was the one that all the other chickens picked on. So we took the chicken away and we raised it and it became nice and big. And then one day we had to give it back for reasons. Did your parents make you eat it though? No, it was... Because that's what happened with my pet goat. Oh, run three finished. Wow! 250 seconds by the last run here. This one got absolutely creamed. Alright then. Okay, point to Fatty Dove, I guess. Well, I mean... For throughput. Yeah, beating the worst is not exactly an achievement. So, round two. This one right here. Should I just start ripping this thing open? Do you want to avoid that warranty? Oh yeah. Open! Wow, that sticker! Stop! You're done! Oh, and it's bent. Yep. You bet your Fatty Dove. Wow, that is not a lot of PCB. Tell me something, Anthony. Are you finding this out for the first time or did you have one of these open already? I did not have one of these open already. I should have gotten one and opened one, but this is actually very fascinating to me right now. Now, I have seen SSDs that have taken a similar approach with a full-size 2.5 inch enclosure and I've actually seen ones that are like as small as just right here. Okay, so based on looking at the back of the PCB, I'd say that's our controller right there and I'm guessing no DRAM cache because it looks like there's just one chip right there. It does have a DRAM cache! It's right here! No way! So that seems to be a silicon motion controller. We're gonna have to check this Samsung part number to find out if the 128 meg cache is correct and then as we discussed, there is in fact only a single NAND flash chip on this PCB, but based on how far flash has come in the last few years, I guess you can get adequate enough performance for a SATA SSD out of just a single chip, which I guess kind of makes sense because, you know, a max capacity NVMe drive is only gonna have four chips on it with a lot of the high performance ones having just two, so SATA is like a fraction of that speed. Wow! I'm impressed! Okay, let's find out how much cache it actually has though. This benchmark is done and the Micron SSD is definitely better, but not necessarily because it has a DRAM cache, probably just because it's got better engineered firmware and a better controller. Okay, I want to check these part numbers now. I think that's an E. DRAM chip, DDR3, SD RAM, 1 gigabit. Okay, so 128 megs. Surprisingly then, as broken as the packaging and product page were, the main controversial element of this thing, whether or not it had a DRAM cache, ended up being true. Although with that said, the power loss protection did not end up being present. There's no bank of capacitors here that looks anything like that, so that is clearly not accurate. Why would they say that? Is it to do with the fact that compared to a hard drive, you don't have to worry about if you lose power, the head parking? Oh, or it could be that they mean that compared to something like just a DRAM drive, the data is held persistently. Right, right. It's like volatile. Yeah, non-volatile storage. I don't know what they're going after there. But for 20 bucks, actually not bad. Don't know about the longevity, right? Yeah, can't speak to that, but hey, five-year warranty, right? So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this little adventure in exploring weird, cheap hardware off of AliExpress, then maybe check out our show and tell where everyone bought the weirdest hardware they could possibly find and then see who had Seedsoft, who had whatever. It was weird. Go check it out. Thanks for watching.