Gadgetory

okay so today's video yeah it's a product that really makes no sense to me at least on the surface this right here is I've actually got the product page up behind me this is coconut cookie cake get in here check this out check this up this is the I don't know Highland star microelectronic anyway we ordered it from usb dot Brando dot-com and this doodad right here adapts as regular SATA interface with some controller from Sage that I've never heard of to 10 micro SD slots that's quality right there so yes my friends today we're gonna make our own SSD today's videos brought to you by tunnel bear the simple VPN Tritonal bear for free at tunnel bear comm /l tt we're gonna have that linked below so step one is gonna be some aren t effing em because while it does seem fairly straightforward in principle you take the 10 micro SD cards that kingston graciously sent you because you're a famous youtuber and then you install them in all the things i do want to make sure that we are doing it correctly so instructional note number the first you can use 1 2 4 8 or 10 micro SD cards at one time it does not support 3 5 7 or 9 instructional step number ii insert the micro SD cards into the micro SD slots one by one as the order shown on adapter where's th p0l i just seek on TF 1 TF 6 TF 2 I think that's for trans flash why does this PCB say demo on it okay well we're just gonna we're just gonna go according to the numbers so where's here's TF 1 let's do this thing wait doing this write down and then you slide it there we go so the idea here is that it runs all of your micro SD cards which aside from being a much lower grade typically than the NAND flash that you would find in an SSD are fundamentally the same thing it runs them all in raid 0 to make up for the fact that a typical micro sd card will be capable of anywhere from you know 20 to maybe 80 to 90 megabytes a second reads and writes whereas a typical SSD especially a SATA 3 one can saturate a SATA 3 interface at around you know 500 mm 50 or so megabytes per second one problem that I do foresee though is that there's more to life than sequential performance when it comes to SSDs and the Caen troller dictates what the random performance will be like and oh that too ignores the other problem which is that the flash on a typical microSD card is not only slower but also less resilient than the higher quality stuff on a normal SSD a problem that is compounded this is all about the problems with this thing Hey compounded by the fact that you're running this whole thing in raid 0 so one dead micro SD card means there goes your data it's got so there it is for better or for worse this is now a 1.2 terabyte raid 0 micro SD SATA SSD I don't know what it is let's plug it in this is so dumb it's like cool but it's like why there it is don't weigh 1.1 6 terabytes of useable space let's call this drive letter k has it special so I'm actually a bit of a loss now because I'm gonna let you guys behind the curtain for a second here while I was prepping this video I actually realized that this probably wasn't going to work because I hadn't gone through the instructions ahead of time and I just noticed that it says right here do not support uhs-1 and these are quite clearly uhs-1 cards so I was expecting to like go on a field trip to Best Buy and come back but it's working so let's let's test it I guess ok so if I told you we have the world's stupidest SSD special k drive here how would you benchmark it it's 10 micro SD cards on a PCB we could use crystal is broke Jews at oh yes I'm coming into this with literally no expectations whatsoever actually at 512-byte that's right even that bad is it this is that a queue depth of eight though so to be clear this is very unrealistic for a desktop were close okay so there's a couple of takeaways here number one is that our drive is indeed SATA to and number two is that the performance is actually better than I expected but this is just sequential this doesn't really tell us anything about how it would perform in a real-world workload let's head it with crystal disk mark just for lulz oh wow um we're still gonna run the pass mark test I guess but this is not looking good for random performance this is performing about like you'd expect from a bad SSD four or five years ago because there's a lot more to SSD performance than just taking a bunch of NAND flash and writing to and reading from it in a parallelized manner to get more speed out of it the controller intelligence has to be high in order to get better oh wow these random numbers these are awful okay so for our last trick pass mark just thread test so the average latency here doesn't really tell us the whole story because where you really feel the slowness of a drive is when it when it spikes that's what most modern SSDs are really trying to overcome this those spikes and latency that's when you like click on something and you feel like your computer's like so we are seeing spikes up to almost half a second on this drive with a lot of them actually sitting here around a fifth of a second so while you could run an OS on this thing I really wouldn't recommend it and to drive that point home I've actually spent the last half an hour waiting for Windows to install off a USB Drive and it's still at 81% of getting files ready for installation this thing is kind of painfully slow like to the point where I'm having a really hard time figuring out what its purpose could possibly be because you might go oh well you know maybe disposable data that you need to be faster than a hard drive but not as fast as an SSD like a steam game library but even then the cost is so high to fill this thing with 64 gig or 128 gig microSD cards like we did would cost more than just buying a proper SSD like a crucial MX 500 or a WD blue so I'm not sure why it exists but it does and it's cool so there it is and you know what else is cool Dollar Shave Club if you have it for whatever reason signed up for Dollar Shave Club then now is a better time than ever for just five bucks they are offering their shave shower starter set it includes their executive razor as well as three trial size versions of some of their most popular products their body wash their shave butter and their one wipe Charlies butt wipes after the starter set replacement cartridges are just a few bucks a month's so head over to dollarshaveclub.com slash lightest we're gonna have that link below and join the club so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the maybe not that this thing but maybe the SD cards and and that site actually where we got this has lots of other cool random gadgets as well so you can check that out at the link in the video description also linked down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join