Product Showcase

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos. Right then, here comes the packaging. The samples come as a 512 GB package. Performance is listed at a maximum of 560 MB/s read and 530 MB/s writes with roughly 90,000 IOPS at 4k random read aligned disk access with our tested models (both M.2. and 2.5").
 

This is the 2.5" SATA III 512 GB version all packaged up in the bundle. You should easily be able to place it somewhere in your chassis. Small and light-weight. For the M.2 device any M.2 slot will do, even slower 10 Gbps versions as we are not talking nVME here.
 

The SSD supports TRIM making sure your SSD will regain its speed once in idle. Obviously you do need to connect it to a proper SATA 3 (6G) controller though, the best ones can be found on the Intel series 6 and 7, 8 and 9 chipset based products. We also find the latest AMD FM2 based chipsets to perform well. This is a value drive so everything possible that doesn't have an impact on quality or the product itself was stripped away, just the SSD with nice metal shielding, some screws and a manual is in the bundle.

The SSD still feels a little heavy due to the housing. When we look at the connectors, we spot the standard power and Serial ATA connectors. This drive is SATA 3 (6G). Obviously the drives are backwards compatible with SATA 2 as well, but the bandwidth limitation there would be capped to roughly 270 MB/sec (which is still silly fast compared to HDDs). A proper SATA 6G cable is recommended and should be delivered with your motherboard. We, however, never ever had issues with a standard older SATA 2 cable either. It seems that SATA 3 cables are a little thicker, that's all. The casing of the SSD is made out of metal, great for shielding. 

The M.2 version comes in a smaller, simpler package. We'll look into some PCB and component photos on the next page though.