Testing the CHEAPEST 1TB SSD on Amazon!

This is the cheapest 1TB SSD I could find on Amazon – at least delivered by Prime next day shipping anyway – and this costs just £41.54 – for 1TB of SSD space! That’s pretty crazy. This is the fanxiang 1TB 2.5” SATA SSD, let’s have a really quick look around it then get it in my test PC and see how it handles. This claims up to 560MB/s reads and 510MB/s writes, which for a SATA SSD isn’t the absolute limit, a little over 600MB/s is, but it’s close. Of course compared to the M.2 SSDs we’re used to now this seems positively antiquated – only twice the speed of a hard drive? What’s the point?! Well, as I showed in a recent test, quite a lot for gaming. Check that out in the cards above if you want to know more. 

The drive itself is a pretty typical 2.5” form factor, with mounting holds on the sides and bottom, SATA power and SATA data connectors on the side, and that’s about it. This is pretty devoid of branding, with only the fanxiang logo up at the top, the the words “Solid State Drive” in the most typewriter font possible in the other corner. Seriously, that’s it. There isn’t much else to say, so let’s plug it in and see what it can do! Firing it up, I am happy to report that unlike £10 1TB SSDs this is legit – a full 1TB of capacity, admittedly only at SATA III speeds anyway. Crystal Disk Mark has it right on the quoted figures – 561.6MB/s reads and 518MB/s writes – that’s actually slightly higher than quoted on the writes. Not significantly, but it’s higher, and that’s great. It’s perfectly good for a SATA SSD, although I did want to throw in some other drives for comparison’s sake. Two USB SSDs, and then a couple M.2 options, specifically a Gen 4 and a Gen 5. The same sequential test has the fanxiang only barely dropping read performance to 505MB/s, and writes to 510.5MB/s, but considering even the USB C drives lost at least 200MB/s, that’s impressive from the fanxiang! With a random 4K block and a queue depth of 32 the fanxiang actually climbs places on the USB C drives – which isn’t too surprising, random block requests aren’t great over USB – but you’d be surprised how close the Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives got to this SATA SSD in this test! The Solidigm P44 Pro was less than twice as fast in writes, and almost exactly twice as fast on reads. Considering the drive is otherwise a power of ten faster, this is impressive work from the fanxiang. With a queue depth of one the read performance gap stays the same – actually technically closes ever so slightly – although the write gap grows a fair bit to the NVMe drives. Still not in line with their available bandwidth, but still.

As for AS SSD, I’ve been able to throw in a couple Gen 3 M.2’s for a slightly farer comparison, and, well, at least with this top end sequential test it doesn’t look amazing. To be fair, this is pretty decent SATA SSD performance – this is an apples to pears comparison afterall – although I find it interesting the USB C SSDs are so much faster at the top end. With a random 4K block size the fanxiang moves up the charts to basically tied with the Samsung 970 EVO PLUS Gen 3 NVMe SSD, at least on writes anyway. Reads are a little under half, but that isn’t bad at all especially for a SATA drive! With 64 threads available we get more performance, although the gap to the Gen 3 drives expands quite a lot. It is in line with the bandwidth limits available for the most part. At least the fanxiang is still faster than both USB C SSDs! Lastly for the synthetic tests is ATTO Disk Benchmark, which shows the fairly average performance. Again good for a SATA drive, but the top end just isn’t there – both USB C SSDs beat this at any block size larger than 32KB. Still, for a SATA drive this is fine.

As for file transfers, transferring a large file set from a much faster drive, the fanxiang sits at around 400MB/s on average. It bounces up and down a fair bit, with peaks up to the high 500MB/s mark, and dips down to the 200MB/s mark. While it’s a shame this isn’t just pinned at 510MB/s as claimed, it’s still plenty fast. Duplicating those files stresses both reads and writes simultaneously so the expected performance is around half the peak, and that’s true here. This sits around the 200-250MB/s mark, which is actually pretty good for a full scale duplication. Naturally since this is in a housing – even a plastic one – and isn’t exactly ripping performance this thing didn’t get hot at all. 46°c was the peak, and that’s nothing in the world of SSDs. It’s safe to say this thing does exactly what it says on the tin, and that’s great.

So, is the fanxiang 1TB SSD worth buying? Well if you’re after a 1TB 2.5” SSD, I don’t see why not. Just because it’s the cheapest and isn’t a major brand name you might recognise doesn’t mean it isn’t legit. The performance is spot on for a SATA SSD, the capacity isn’t in question, and this is – at least as far as I can find – the cheapest 1TB SSD available on Amazon UK (that’s available on Prime). This gets a thumbs up from me, so if you want to check it out I’ll leave a link in the description below.