Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts
Conclusion
PROS
- Good performance.
- Highly competitive cost (see below).
CONS
- Cache size of ~4-5GB does not scale up proportionally with capacity.
- Caching performance inconsistent under heavier loads.
Pricing (as currently listed at MyDigitalDiscount)
- 128GB – $56 ($0.43/GB)
- 256GB – $89 ($0.34/GB
- 512GB – $150 ($0.29/GB)
- 1TB – $318 ($0.31/GB)
Prices are great. These are not only cheaper than 960 EVOs, they are cheaper than 860 EVO (SATA) SSDs at the smaller capacities, all while offering better performance.
Warranty and Endurance
Endurance: 120TBW (128GB), 200TBW (256GB), 375TBW (512GB), 800TBW (1TB)
Warranty period is 5 years, and the endurance figures are solid, even if they don't seem to scale proportionally with capacity.
Final Thoughts
The MyDigitalSSD SBX line achieves the goal of getting consumers from the 'MB/s range' of SATA SSDs into the 'GB/s range' of NVMe products. Sure the interface is limited to PCIe 3.0 x2, but that's a justified consequence of using the Phison PS5008 E8 controller, which brings higher power efficiency and lower cost. Despite the lower straight line speeds, I'm impressed with the performance and especially the price of the SBX SSD lineup, and will likely make it a default recommendation for budget builds moving forward.
“The SBX uses the Phison
“The SBX uses the Phison PS5008-E8 controller, not the PS5008-E8T (dramless), so we find NANYA / Micron flash accompanying the controller on each part.”
Is this supposed to be NANYA / Micron DRAM?
LOL yup. Fixed, thanks!
LOL yup. Fixed, thanks!
I have a bpx… I would have
I have a bpx… I would have sent it back compared to my samsung ssd if i needed the money. Building a PC, sure buy this. Upgrading, anything less than a 1TB just doesn’t seem to add much value. About the only thing it does noticeably faster is unrar. At least with 1TB, you could put a few games on it since games are now 100GB each.
anyways, nice review.
Great in depth review.
Great in depth review. Thanks for bringing new products like this to us. I am definitely interest in getting a 500 or 1 TB for my next build.
I’m still using spinning
I’m still using spinning rust, and I can multitask while the lappy boots up by gettng my coffee ready during the process. Whenever they decide to make a 500GB SSD/1TB hard-drive hybrid drive I’ll become interested. I still like laptops that come with CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives as that can be swapped out for a hard/SSD drive caddy also.
Is MyDigital a Chinese firm?
Is MyDigital a Chinese firm? Where would you have to send their products for RMA if worst were to happen?
Their website shows their
Their website shows their location as in Oswego, NY, and they have a US toll free number for customer service.
i still rather get something
i still rather get something from westerndigital. at least i know t hey stand behind their stuff.
How would performance be
How would performance be affected on a system with PCIe 2.0? I appreciate the power efficiency and cost saving of using PCIe 3.0 (2x), but I’m considering using one of these drives to update an older system that only has PCIe 2.0. I’d be using an m.2 to PCIe adapter. It would be going into a 16x slot running 8x,but as far as I can tell, it will run at 2x speed, which tops out well below the speed of this drive. A drive with 4x should still have plenty of overhead, even at PCIe 2.0 speeds.