Review on SSD Smartbuy 2.5″ Splash 512GB SATA3 3D TLC NAND SBSSD-512GT-MX902-25S3

Good afternoon! I bring to your attention a review of the 2019 Smartbuy Splash drive with a capacity of 512 Gigabytes.

The Smartbuy trademark has long been present on a market of solid state drives. And although the company does not have its own production capacities, but ordering products from reputable suppliers from the Asian region, it offers, albeit not ultra-modern, but high-quality, and at the same time what is especially important in our time, affordable products.

Before, when buying a Smartbuy drive, one could expect from him the presence of a Taiwanese Phison brand controller, as well as, most likely, the origin from the assembly line of the same company. But with the new Splash drive, this tradition has been violated – instead of Phison, another manufacturer is indicated on the packaging – the Chinese Longsys Electronics.

However, despite the little-known name, this is by no means a small company, but one of the largest manufacturers of storage devices in China. In particular, she owns the rights to the well-known Lexar brand, acquired at one time from the American Micron. The company itself was founded in 1999 and in the near future is going to produce drives entirely on the Chinese element base.

At least one Chinese component is already used in this device – this is the Maxiotek MAS0902 controller. It is supplemented by a flash memory such as 3D TLC, although in such an inexpensive device one could expect cheaper QLC memory. The drive is packed in a cardboard box with a detailed description of the characteristics of the goods:

To ensure safety, the disc is enclosed in a transparent plastic box:

In addition to the drive itself, there is nothing more in the delivery package, so for its fastening in the case you will need to find several screws.

The drive case is made of plastic, which is quite natural for its price category:

After the first start-up, the SMART disk definition program showed already 8 on/off cycles, while the operating time was less than one hour. Apparently, these eight cycles were needed to factory check the quality of the disk.

After the first connection to the computer, the test program issued a maximum data transfer rate of no more than 300 Mb / s, which is almost half the declared value.

As it turned out later, not all SATA connectors in the system unit corresponded to the latest version of the SATA interface, namely SATA3, which led to such a dramatic drop in performance.

After the disk was connected to the corresponding connector on the motherboard, the parameters returned to normal, close to the theoretical speed of this interface (600 Mb/s):

Also, disk performance was tested by AS SSD Benchmark:

The results are not record, but quite decent for this price category. Unfortunately, the Smartbuy official website has not yet posted a software package for working with this particular drive as it was practiced with devices based on Phison controllers, but it may also appear in the near future.

In conclusion, we can conclude that despite the change of supplier from Taiwan to China, Smartbuy once again turned out to be a successful product with very attractive price / volume and price / quality ratios .

The article is written on the basis of materials of this site.

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