 Anthony, hey, can I borrow a USB? I asked for a USB. You have what you need, my child. Now go. What is this thing? Has storage chips on it, but none of the interfaces you'd expect from a storage device. Wait, it's an internal USB header. But what is this thing? Who's it for? Why did I pay $90 for it? Do you know about our sponsor? Origin PC. Origin PC's all new EVO 17S thin and light laptop can be customized with up to an RTX 3080 Ti, a 12th gen Intel core processor, and up to a 17.3 inch 240 Hertz QHD LED screen. Learn more at the link down below. This peculiar piece is the Micron E230 USB 2.0 SSD. And it must be the most money that we have ever spent, or at least in the past decade, for eight gigabytes of flash memory. For the price of just one of these, I could have purchased 20 of these. So what is the deal with this thing? Well, this is what's called a USB DOM, or DOM. And it has nothing to do with the much kinkier sub and DOMs you may have heard of, although there are a few that are not. Although there are other such terms like master and slave. Man, the tech community, am I right? DOM in this context stands for Disk-on Module. And in many ways, it's not that different from any other storage drive. It's just that you don't need any additional power or ribbon cables to connect it. It's just a module with a disk on it that plugs directly into the motherboard, kind of like an M.2 drive, but with much, much worse performance. So it's just a USB drive, but with a wonky connector? Yes, but also no. There are a couple of key differences at play here. For starters, this thing is server grade. The E230 has 15-bit ECC for maintaining data integrity, static and dynamic wear leveling to extend the lifetime of the device by divvying out the work to all the blocks in the NAND equally, and a very specific small form factor. Let me show you what something like this might be used for. Hey, oh, no. Oh boy. Oh, there we go. Yeah, it's a little jank in some servers. They don't have the little guides, so you just had to kind of line it up and hope that you're not mashing pins. But of course, USB 2.0 pins are very thick, so you don't really need to worry about mashing them too much. Whatever kind of storage server you have, you'll have a limited number of SATA and PCIe connections, but you still need something to hold your OS that you're gonna run, right? If you're running something like Unraid, which runs entirely in RAM while the system is on, this is the perfect solution for a low-cost, reliable boot drive. Just pop it into the USB 2.0 header on your Bobo, boot into it, and because it will only very occasionally receive reads or writes, it should run reliably for a long time. Furthermore, this tiny form factor lends itself well to compact 1U or 2U servers, where space is at a premium. Also, being server hardware, you get the spec bumps to match across the board, including rated operating temperatures, shock and vibration ratings, and life expectancy, or meantime before failures. So for a specific person, this is just the thing they were looking for. It also would be great for super compact embedded systems with specific purposes. Like this drive even has a screw hole to keep it tightly fastened to the motherboard. But why not just use any USB drive? Servers have USB ports, right? Well, they do, but generally servers don't bother with more than two USB ports, so you can plug in a keyboard and mouse. But the real issues are reliability and security. The second last thing you want is for someone to snag their sweater on the boot drive of a mission critical machine, ripping it out. And the last thing you want is a near-do-well swiping it, inserting some malicious code and plugging it back in. Another reason USB drives suck for this purpose is they tend to be made at the absolute worst man manufacturers can find. It runs slowly, it's prone to errors, and generally has a very limited lifespan. This is fine for those cheapo random USB keys that you get during your college's orientation week beside the bowl of condoms. But when you need to, you know, do real work, they're dangerous to rely on. So why do companies sell products that they know are unreliable at all? For a few reasons. You see, not all silicon is created equally. And when you're doing any sort of manufacturing, you're gonna encounter mistakes and errors that will lead to losses and waste. Companies want to minimize that waste to maximize profits. For example, at lttstore.com, we sell scrunchies made from the scraps from producing our t-shirts. This not only reduces the amount of material heading to the landfill, but also lets us sell more of the fabric that we purchase for production. This is something you see all the time in the tech world, for example, with CPUs. Often AMD or Intel will be trying to produce a bunch of their top of the line multi-core CPUs, but due to errors or impurities in the manufacturing process, some of those cores aren't functioning up to spec, resulting in poor performance or instability. Well, they don't just throw it out. There's still plenty of meat on that bone. You activate the faulty cores, slap a new name on it, drop the price, and baby, you got a skew going. In fact, binning is what leads to CPUs like the new 12900KS, which is literally just a 12900K, but clocked a bit faster. In this case, binning isn't the only factor affecting performance. Lower quality controllers can also influence speed, and I bet this cheap drive has a very low quality controller. There's also another reason that these things still go for 90 bucks. This device uses SLC, or Single Level Cell NAND. It's the most basic form of NAND. It only accepts one bit per memory cell, but it's also kind of the best. The TLC, or QLC, NAND in modern SSDs hold three or four bits per memory cell, allowing for much greater storage capacity, but this comes at the cost of speed and reliability, which in a server setting isn't ideal. To see this in action, we tested this rando thumb drive we have here in Crystal Disk Mark, and it ran at about 17.8 megabytes per second, or 142 megabits per second, which is less than a third of the max speed of the USB 2.0 spec, and man, those write speeds are just terrible. They're five megabytes per second. Compare that to this thing, which runs nearly twice the speed for reads and triple the speeds for writes. I mean, obviously, all of these numbers pale in comparison to a SATA SSD, or even a USB 3.0 thumb drive, but go easy, this bad boy's over 10 years old. Now these days, you would be better off using a SATA DOM if you, saying that after that joke earlier. These days, you would be better off using a SATA DOM if you have the space available in your system and the budget. It serves the same function as a USB DOM, but can read and write much faster. Or you could use an internal USB three-header DOM, or a normal drive and an internal type A port, something many modern server motherboards are actually equipped with now. It all depends on your tolerance to dealing with boot drive rebuilds. I know Linus and Jake have experienced multiple drive failures on their un-raid boxes over the years, including some of our servers here. And it's been a bit of a pain in the butt. Bottom line, if you're in the market for a device with higher quality NAND, enterprise level features like ECC and wear leveling, and a very specific form factor that allows you to use that last empty port on your motherboard, well, this is for you. If you are literally anyone else, then you might want to look at our sponsor. Squarespace. Running your own business can be hard, but making your website doesn't have to be. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that makes it easy to get your website up and running quickly. So grow your business online through their marketing features, including SEO support, email campaigns, and special tools. They have a wide selection of award-winning mobile optimized templates, and their commerce platform comes with everything you need, from merchandising to checkout. If you need help, Squarespace offers help guides, and a 24-7 support team. We love Squarespace so much, we even use it for lionsmedia.com, which is a hell of a website. Have you been there? Head to squarespace.com, forward slash LTT, and get 10% off today. Thanks for watching, guys. This is a very specific piece of hardware here, so maybe go check out another very specific piece of hardware, the G-RAID storage controller. That thing is actually pretty cool, although Wendell from Level One Texts had some words to say about it that I think we should probably consider. Oh, hey, look, this came off. We did it, Reddit.