Real-life test of the world’s cheapest SSD was so bad, a hard drive would probably beat it — which is what the reviewer actually did and broke the poor thing in two
Now that Amazon Prime Day is here, you’re probably considering all kinds of deals on the cheapest SSDs available right now. But just because something is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worth buying – as the Goldenfir SSD proves.
This $3 SSD – available on AliExpress – has a capacity of 120 GB and may seem way too good to be true. But that’s because it is, according to Storage overviewthat analyzed the specifications and extensively tested the device.
Goldenfir claims it offers read speeds of up to 550 MB/s and write speeds of up to 510 MB/s, thanks to the YS9083XT SSD controller – which supports multiple types of NAND Flash memory and a variety of form factors. The Goldenfir SSD is specifically a 2.5 inch SATA SSD.
Goldenfir’s $3 SSD is the opposite of a must-buy
The reported speeds are not super slow according to the manufacturer, but they are nothing like the fastest SSDs out there. At least in theory, they’re closer to the speeds recorded when the first consumer-grade SSDs hit the market. But how does that work in practice?
Storage Review tested the SSD with a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 server, equipped with an AMD 7742 CPU and 512 GB DDR4 RAM, and compared it to the Kingston DC600M – a leading enterprise storage device.
The drive registered a score of 554 MB/s and 518 MB/s for read and write respectively on CrystalDiskMark – which isn’t bad at all, considering the Kingston DC600M SSD scored 557 MB/s and 541 MB/s.
But the catch is that the benchmarking software may have generated a high score because of the way it is configured (it uses host-side caching). Other measurements produced terrible results and the device even broke in half during testing.
On 4K random read and write benchmarks, the Goldenfir severely underperformed – and exhibited terrible latency, which was backed up by 64K sequential tests.
In the previous tests, it achieved 13,000 IOPS with a latency of 10,225 ms for read operations, while Kingston achieved 780,000 IOPs and a latency of 1,630 ms. For writes it was even worse, barely exceeding 5,000 IOPs and peaking at 14,000 ms latency.
This pattern continued, with the Goldenfir even producing terrible results compared to other budget SSDs. For example, the $33 Intel 670p 2TB Gen3 SSD peaked at 473,000 IOPS at 264 ms for the 4K random read test.