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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?
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.