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Would You Trust This?
(piefed-media.feddit.online)
I bought a 2242 size m.2 SSD to use as lvm cache for an external DAS I'm working with. The drive is supposed to be 64GB, but when I pulled it up in gparted I found the below. (I created the partition to see what would happen.) If my calculations are correct, this drive is acting like a 1TB drive instead of a 64GB drive.
If my calculator is correct, a 64GB drive should be 59.6 GiB instead of 931.5 GiB.
So, would you trust this drive?
Hell no, that kind of behavior is what those aliexpress/wish knockoff drives do to fool the customer base stupid enough to trust the listing.
I would go so far as to say to get a refund and go to an actual store so you're not buying bootlegs.
I agree - I wouldn't trust it either...and, surprisingly, this one came from Amazon, and not some fly-by-night AliExpress store. (I rarely purchase something there without seeing reviews first...
But the other thing about this is that I checked out the website for the product. They are a company that specializes in enterprise and embedded products. I was pretty certain I had heard of them before in the enterprise world, which is why I purchased the drive.
The reason I bought this drive was because it specifies having a NAND cache on it (MLC, but beggars can't be choosers with drives like this), whereas the others I looked at didn't have (or at list didn't have specs which listed having) any form of NAND caching.
@nao@sh.itjust.works - thanks f or the pointer to f3 -- I'll grab it and check the drive before I return it.
Okay - wild... The results of f3probe:
Oops - misstated something before. This is an MLC NAND drive, the cache is supposed to be DDR4 DRAM. I suspect, however, this is a mis-labeled drive...
Amazon has largely become AliExpress with faster shipping. You have to be very careful to make sure that's not what you're getting in the first place.
Amazon also encourages counterfeits and fraud through their policy of "commingling" all sellers, even if it's a trustworthy and reputable product. If any of those third party sellers are scammers, the entire product is tainted.
Yeah, I'm quite aware of a lot of the junk on Amazon -- and I normally would stick to a well known brand like Samsung, WD, or Crucial... But there were no listings for m.2 SSD's in the 32-64G range. At first I ordered a "Kingdata" drive (an obvious play on Kingston), but later I saw a listing for a drive from Transcend -- which I recalled from my IT days, and a quick check of their website confirmed they were the company I was thinking of.
So, this is why I am fairly certain that this is some kind of labeling / packaging mistake. Transcend is reasonably well-known, and afaik aren't scammers.
And, to top it off, I ran some additional tests on the drive... And for what it is, it is performing exactly how I would have expected: 420MB/s read/write, with 0.1msec access times -- with extreme consistency. (Given that this is installed on a PCIE adapter that only has 1 lane available.)
There are no M.2 drives in the 32-64GB range in the same way there are no <8GB USB flash drives or SD cards from reputable vendors anymore - the cost of production for the product without storage cells of even the smallest capacity no longer reach the price floor you are probably thinking of (Unless it's used or trash). This is why you can't seemingly find drives under 256GB for SATA or M.2 from any of the trustworthy players - the margins and sales volumes would never be justified.
Also brands get bought up. Some of the weaker fish of today end up being the scam shells of tomorrow - ask Kodak.