FanXiang S109 SATA III Internal SSD

This is probably one of the best 2.5" SATA SSD on the market, certainly the most well made 2.5" by fanxiang, an upcoming Chinese brand, surpassing their previous generation models. This is a first look as I only received the 1TB model for one day, and already revived an old PC by installing Windows 7 (for lightscribe), burned a NixOS DVD with lightscribe to boot into NixOS. The Gnome Disks app shows it correctly as Fanxiang S109 1TB, with SMART data. The old computer now feels much more snappy. With many of my several years old name brand ssd's dying left and right, I am reconsidering my opinion on the general durability of consumer ssd's. Yet my much older dvd drives and discs still work without issue. That's why you see me burning discs again with a wonderful but unfortunately long abandoned lightscribe labeling tech. My recommendation on SSD's is now buy new, data integrity worths a lot, saving a few bucks on ebay is not worth it, especially given the high rate of failure within a few years, even with only light use.

Not the fastest drive out there but for a small cost and to bring new life into an older laptop or desktop this is the perfect upgrade over the old spinning type drives. I was able to load a clean windows install in about 20mins and was up and running in 30mins on my old Dell laptop. The performance is night and day compared to this drive vs the older drive that was in there. Boots up in about 15s seconds and everything seems to load a lot faster. Had to knock down a star because I was not getting the advertised speed but honestly I really can't tell the difference when loading programs or surfing the web.

This Fanxiang S101 250GB SSD SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive is adequate. I get nervous when using basically no-name devices like this as information can be lost if the quality doesn't hold up. So far, it works well enough to be useful.

This was a pretty inexpensive 250GB SSD 2.5" drive, though the performance numbers were a little less than stellar. It did OK, but didn't quite meet the 550Mb/s read speeds. It fell far short at around 460 or about 15% slower. Write speeds were better, at 415Mb/s instead of 450Mb/s or only about 7% slower.

Still, for the price, performance is adequate and it comes with a 3-year warranty. It arrives with the partition table set to MBR. I had no problems changing it to GPT, partitioning it and formatting it as an NTFS drive.

I can recommend it as a very inexpensive solution for a small drive, well-suited for a portable drive enclosure (which is how I'll be using it.)