Testing the CHEAPEST 1TB M.2 SSD on Amazon!

THIS is the cheapest 1TB M.2 SSD I could find on Amazon – available on Prime anyway – although this isn’t the cheapest 1TB SSD. I already tested that, the fanxiang S101, in this video you can find in the cards above, but since that’s a SATA SSD and plenty of people don’t even know what SATA is anymore, I figured it’d be worth checking out what your M.2 options are, and it seems like this form factor commands a premium, because where the fanxiang 2.5” drive was just £41.54, this was £51.99, as were a few other options. Interestingly though, this isn’t just any M.2 drive, it’s a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 drive! Now it isn’t a full fat NVMe 2.0 drive, it’s NVMe 1.4, DRAMless and claims just 5GB/s reads and 4.8GB/s writes. I say ‘just’ there, but that’s fantastic performance if true. That’s faster than any Gen 3 drive, and almost TEN TIMES FASTER than the fanxiang SATA drive, so let’s see if your extra tenner for the same capacity is worth it!

First, let’s have a little look at this thing. This is a standard looking 2280 single-sided M.2 drive. It’s really pretty basic, although personally I think things get a little interesting when you turn it over and see that they’ve not bothered to populate all the pins on the back of the M.2 key. This isn’t a mistake, drives like this don’t always use every pin, this is cost cutting. That gold plating on the pads might be a fraction of a penny, but if you’re making a million of them? Well that adds up. Things get even more interesting when you peel the sticker back and realise that not only is this a DRAMless drive – that in and of itself isn’t exactly a problem, it’s just not amazing – but the NAND packages are completely unmarked. This is the sort of thing you generally find on grey market tech where the chips are either fakes or have been scrubbed so you can’t find out where they came from (because they are recycled). This is, in my honest opinion, a little sus. At least the controller is legit, a TenaFe TC2201, a DRAMless NVMe 1.4 controller that is supposedly good for up to 7.4GB/s on reads and 7GB/s on writes – a decent chunk higher than this UD90’s performance – although I suspect part of that is that this controller is good for up to four channels of 2400MT/s NAND, where this drive has some combination of only two chips. That’s likely where the performance being left on the table went. Still, especially for the price, if it does what it says it does, this can still be a great choice. 

So, does it meet expectations? Let’s fire it up and find out! Starting with Crystal Disk Mark and the best-case-scenario sequential queue depth of 8 test, the UD90 is sitting at 4.6GB/s on reads and 3.9GB/s on writes. That is almost a gig slower than claimed on writes, although only 400MB/s slower on reads. That isn’t a great start – to be sure it isn’t an instant fail, it is faster than some of the other NVMe 1.4 drives I’ve tested, namely the Orico E5000 and Lexar Thor Pro, but still. With a queue depth of one, but still sequential IO, there isn’t much change in position, only in performance. The drop here is in line with the other drives, so that’s fine. Moving to the random 4K block test, with a queue depth of 32, amazingly the UD90 is actually second to the top, only behind the Orico IG740-Pro. This is a funny one, because the much faster Gen 5 drive, the Lexar NM1090, is actually faster in reads, but a good bit slower in writes. In fact, at least with this spread of drives, the UD90 is the third slowest on reads (only behind the Thor Pro and the fanxiang SATA SSD), but the writes? Those are impressively strong. With a queue depth of one though, things go back to a more normal position with the UD90 on the lower side. Still very impressive write performance especially for an NVMe 1.4 drive, although the reads aren’t quite as strong. Still, not bad.

As for AS SSD, that has similar standings to Crystal Disk Mark, with the UD90 in the midfield, although on the lower end for Gen 4×4 drives. It keeps up with the Samsung 980 PRO – their original Gen 4×4 drive – at least on writes, although it’s a fair bit back – 1.6GB/s – on reads. Silicon Power’s own NVMe 2.0 drive, the XS70 is the second fastest Gen 4×4 drive I’ve tested here at 5.5 and 5.7GB/s writes and reads respectively, with is a healthy lead over the UD90. That’s to be expected, but interesting to see! As for the random 4K block test, that has the UD90 at the bottom of the Gen 4 drives. This is still totally fine performance, but it just isn’t the best Gen 4×4 drive you can get. The read performance is also on par with Gen 3 drives, which again isn’t surprising. With 64 threads we usually see a lot more performance, and we still do, although the UD90 actually slips a little further down the charts here, even behind the WD SN750, a Gen 3 drive. At least the read performance is a touch higher – and higher than the Lexar Thor Pro. 

As for ATTO Disk Benchmark, that one is rather interesting. Both the read and write performance peaks between 32KB and 256KB block sizes, but then drops quite considerably after that. That is, as you can see from the other drives included, a brand new phenomenon. Some drives have a weird flatline before going up again, but this just flatlines, dropping below the Gen 3 drives. This is only a Gen 4 drive for that specific block size – anything else is a midfield Gen 3 drive performance. Weird!

As for file transfers – from a faster drive that I know can do over 3GB/s, this UD90 peaks at 3GB/s, but isn’t the most stable there. It bounces between a touch over 3GB/s and 2GB/s, which isn’t bad, although isn’t the absolute best I’ve seen. My usual file duplication stress test shows some interesting performance, initially running at around 1.7GB/s, but after 50GB or so (so 150GB total) it drops to around 1.1GB/s. After a further 70GB the performance jumps off a cliff. It was sitting at 250MB/s – that’s hard drive speeds! That’s not exactly appealing performance is it?

To be fair, for the price this still isn’t bad. This is not a top-notch Gen 4×4 drive, in some cases it loses to Gen 3 drives, although for almost a tenner less than a decent Gen 4×4 drive like the Crucial P310, I can see why you’d buy this. Annoyingly right after I bought this some prices shifted on Amazon so there are now actually a couple of other drives that are £1 or £2 less – including a Gen 3 drive from Silicon Power – but still. I find it interesting that this thing costs a tenner more than the fanxiang SATA SSD, and how this one doesn’t feel quite as clear-cut on if you should buy this or not. It sure is cheap for an M.2 drive – a Gen 4×4 drive no less – but it isn’t amazing. It still works just fine and will serve anyone who buys it well enough, but personally I think I’d splash a few quid more on a slightly better drive that at very least uses branded NAND chips – none of this lasered off stuff this thing has… Still, if you want to pick one of these up, or just check out the pricing where you are, I’ll leave a link for you at the top of the description.