Summary:
A good value in terms of $1/gb, but not the fastest performance.
Details:
In general storage is something you should not cheap out on as an extra $50 now can save you a huge headache later on. Generally I buy my storage from Western Digital and Silicon Power, but of course Toshiba and Seagate are also fairly well respected. But I decided to give this Tridenite drive a chance because it looks like it has a nice dollar-to-GB ratio. I am intending to use it as an external drive for quick transfers of backed-up data so the risk seemed acceptable. As such it will eventually go into an external enclosure.
Before testing it as an external drive, however, I put it into my main rig to do some measurements. Here was the output from CrystalDiskMark:
Read:
SEQ1M 2442 MB/s
RND4K 1083 MB/s
Write:
SEQ1M 1839 MB/s
RND4K 878 MB/s
These numbers represent how quickly it can read and write data. They are pretty good in comparison to a physical hard drive or even a slower SSD. But, for context, my main Silicon Power NVMe drive reads and writes at around 3,500 MB/s sequential and 1700 MB/s random. That is quite a bit faster!
Does this matter though? I think that depends a lot on your use case. If you are loading a game, for example, there are a million other things that might be a worse bottleneck than this difference in speed. I haven't set it up yet, but I would guess that when I put this in an external enclosure that the USB 3.0 connection will impose a far greater speed penalty than this difference. Still, this drive is well behind the state of the art and it has the largest gap between reading and writing that I have seen on an SSD.
In summary, if this drive looks like a good deal and you are in the market for an SSD, it is not a bad choice. Certainly it will absolutely destroy any traditional hard drive in performance. Honestly it is amazing that you can buy this kind of performance at this price. But you do still get what you pay for.
The issue I cannot address in this review is long-term reliability. I will be using this drive regularly however and will update if a problem emerges.
| Hard Drive | 2 TB Solid State Drive |
|---|
