A Deep Dive Into Vaseky SSD

In-Depth Look At The SSD

The Vaseky company was established in 2015 in China, its founder and chairman having gained great experience in the market over the preceding decade. In that time, it has grown rapidly from manufacturing to e-commerce, and from a domestic Chinese operation to global marketing. Now, the main products of Vaseky include PCs, and other complete electronic devices, but also their components such as solid-state drives (SSD).

Vaseky boasts that its expertise and innovation can give it a competitive advantage. Also, all of their products from their design, raw material procurement, engineering, and production are strictly controlled, manufactured, and inspected by professionals.

The company provides system solutions, high-quality practical products, with impressive and efficient service, to become an increasingly important industry player and supplier of major computer brand manufacturers, as well as industrial and consumer users.

A growing key area for Vaseky is in the SSD market. And this comes as no surprise. More than any other kind of core component, SSDs are the biggest actual difference-makers when it comes to computer upgrades. Switch to a decent, fast, and reliable SSD, and you can almost immediately see and feel its presence and the difference.

SSDs have hugely changed their shapes, speeds, and storage over the last 12 years, as well as their price too. SSDs have transformed from exorbitantly priced computing luxuries, into essential staples with largely uniformly high quality. In 2008, a 32GB SSD could have set you back around a whopping $800. That’s up to $600 more than today, and for one that’ll give you 60 times the data at about five times the speed!

Interface and manufacturing advances have played their part in this. Oversupply has also come into play. An increasing number of makers have and are entering the market, and storage heavyweights such as Samsung, Micron, Seagate, and Western Digital no longer have it to themselves, and with it their way.

We have seen these established manufacturers, and previously premium-priced drives, discounting under pressure from the new kids on the block, with their built-for-budget drives. The lower end of the price spectrum, that were previously the preserve of the lesser-known budget brands have been penetrated by the big boys. When it comes to pricing and purchasing an SSD, it’s now very much a buyer’s market.

As SSD performance and capabilities have enhanced, prices have dropped. This makes a new SSD, the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade that a user can make. The one downside to this explosion of the SSD market is that the number of choices, especially among budget models, can be overwhelming. Especially if you don’t class yourself as an expert, or even as having moderate experience.

Before we give you our judgment on whether a Vaseky SSD is a worthwhile choice and purchase, it’s therefore important to explain a little about what to look for, to establish who it’s for.

Who’s It For?

Are you a PC user with basic needs, looking to upgrade the standard hard drive in your laptop or desktop with something faster? Then you want to check-out recent SSDs for their specs and price so you will pick the most affordable drive with the capacity you need. As we’ve written, now you may find a brand that you hadn’t even heard of a few years ago.

But you have to know first what form factor of SSD you need and should get. SSDs are no longer only traditional 2.5-inch drives, the same size, and shape as the 2.5-inch hard drives found in most laptops. While these drives are still common, SSDs have been changing shape in recent years.

If you recently bought one of the latest slim laptops it probably requires a gum stick-shaped M.2 drive, if you wish to upgrade it. Also, the latest generations of desktop PCs and their motherboards usually have a slot or slots for M.2 drives. For increasingly popular 2-in-1 laptop and tablet, or for notebooks, a Mini SATA SSD will do the trick.

Both M.2 and Mini SATA SSDs are, if you like, the skinny younger cousin of the older MLC solid-state drive. The ‘M’ of which stands for ‘multi’, meaning that the memory can host two bits per cell. Similarly, more recent tech developments have led to TLCs with ‘triple’, or three bits per cell, and QLC with ‘quad’, or four.

A drive has many millions of cells, so having an extra bit in each cell to store stuff allows TLC or QLC drives to hold more data than MLC drives, but using the same amount of silicon. This has lowered production costs, as fewer actual modules are needed to store the same amount of data.

In truth, the time for QLC, first introduced in 2018, is still to come. For now, TLC provides decent performance along with lower production costs. So, most manufacturers have hitched their ride to, and staked their reputations on, the TLC NAND bandwagon. This type of SSD is the current standard for a low-cost SSD. And for most users, a TLC drive’s performance is perfectly adequate.

But if you’re a creative or another power user who deals with huge files or chunks of data, then a TLC (or QLC) drive probably won’t be for you, particularly if you do so all the time. For your purpose, it’s probably worth paying extra for a costlier MLC drive. And this is the type of drive, in its different-sized forms, that Vaseky manufactures. However, this ‘greater cost’, is only relative as we shall explain.

The other mark against TLC flash is that it generally has a shorter lifespan than the more traditional MLC-based flash memory, Just look in the specs for the terabytes written (TBW) rating. This is the total number of terabytes the drive should be able to write over its lifetime before its cells start to fail.

Every time your PC triggers a write operation the SSD controller writes to ‘fresh’ cells first. But at some point, there are no longer any such unused cells, and it has to start erasing previously used ones and writing to them. An SSD can repeat this erasing, then write to a cell only so many times before a given cell fails and no longer can hold data. In MLC drives, it takes approximately 5,000 writes/erase cycles before a cell can no longer function. In TLCs this is only around 1,000 cycles.

Overall though, the simplest way to ascertain exactly what you’re paying for in an SSD, and so the best value, is to divide its price by its number of gigabytes. For example, an SSD of 240GB priced at $50, costs 20.8 cents per gigabyte. A $50 256GB SSD yields 19.5 cents per gigabyte. These days, the best value ‘budget’ SSDs are around 10 cents per gig. So, always keep in mind this price per performance ratio.

While Vaseky may still not be a household name, its SSDs offer too good value to, at least, not check out and consider for your upgrade. To make the choice easier for you, we’ve tested and reviewed Vaseky’s various SSDs against the latest benchmark tests. These tests examine speed, performance, and value, compared to other generations or brands. Keep reading for more details about each SSD from Vaseky, to help choose the right drive for you, to fit your upgrading path.

What We Like About SSD Review

As well as their price per performance ratio, Vaseky’s different types of MLC solid-state drives offer you quick boot, to improve your PC’s running and boot speed. This includes the faster opening of software, that can effectively improve your efficiency in dealing with heavy work tasks. Enabled by their fast speed and great reliability, we spent less time waiting and got more done

Of course, such performance doesn’t just boost your work. Your gaming too, delivering faster loading for games for your downtime as well.

Vaseky offers new high quality and lightweight designs for a variety of laptop, notebook, and desktop upgrades. Their 7mm slim SSDs come in MLC, M.2, and Mini SATA forms.

All are built with premium Micron/Toshiba MLC Storage Grains, for more reliable performance and a longer lifespan than a TLC SSD. What’s more, they’re noiseless, ‘hotless’, and shockproof. And of course, your storage needs are met by the offer of multiple capacity options.

Their standard SATA interface and 2.5-inch design directly replace your PC’s original 2.5-inch mechanical disk. SATA III 6Gb high-speed interface is used to be backward compatible with SATA II/I, and through CMOS low-power technology effectively reduces power consumption. Supporting optimized instructions such as NCQ / TEIM / SMATR etc, it not only enhances the hard drive’s writing performance but also reduces the chance of loss. It effectively slows down your PC’s decrease in performance over time, thus extending the life of its hard drive.

With Vaseky M.2 SATA SSD, you can boost the performance of the latest generations of slim laptops or desktops. Its fast speeds of up to 317MB/s for reading and 193MB/s for writing; significantly faster than normal HDDs.

The mini 1.8″ form factor improves Vaseky 1.8″ mSATA SSD’s speed of your 2-in-1 laptop/tablet, or notebook, thanks to its mini 1.8″ form factor. Everything will run faster with up to 450Mb/s read speed and up to 500Mb/s write speed.

To ensure the best possible reliability, all models of Vaseky SSD go through three rigorous tests by their quality assurance team: EVT (Engineering Verification Test), AVL Component Quality Evaluation, and DEAM Characterization Test.

What We Don’t Like About SSD Review

Yes, we found installation, build quality, reliability, performance, and speed to be faultless. But this was just over a couple of weeks of testing. For a truer reflection over a longer period, be sure to check out online reviews.

What isn’t in question though, is that Vaskey, like pretty much all budget SSD producers, only offer a three-year warranty, rather than the longer plans of pricier premium models. Samsung, for example, gives five years for its 850 EVO budget SSD model.

What’s Included?

Each model comes with just the drive itself, screws, and the 3 years warranty.

Overview Of Features

All Vaseky SSD models have the following specifications:

Color: Black
Material: Aluminum Alloy Shell
Flash Memory Particles: MLC
Application: Desktop, Laptop, UMPC, MID, PC, Sever
Max Read Speed: 483 MB/s
Max Write Speed: 446 MB/s
Durability Writing: 10 years(100GB writing/day)
Lead Endurance: Unlimited
MTBF: 1,000,000 hours
Warranty: 3 Years

The specs for each specific model are as follows:

SATA 2.5” MLC SSD
Interface: SATA III 6Gb/s
GB Storage Capacity Options: 128/240/350/480
Controller: SMI 2246XT
Release Date: 01/25/19

M.2 2280 MLC SSD
Interface: M.2 SATA
GB Storage Capacity Options: 60/128/240/350/500
Controller: SMI 2258XT
Release Date: 04/23/19

Mini 1.8” mSATA Notebook SSD
Interface: Mini PCIe SATA
GB Storage Capacity Options: 60/128/256/350/480
Controller: SMI 2246XT
Release Date: 01/25/19

Review Summary

Vaseky SSDs offer easy installation, good build quality, reliability, consistent performance, and fast speeds across all MLC models with a wide storage capacity offer. All of this on a budget for an excellent price per performance ratio. We were impressed!

You may not know the Vaseky brand name yet. But we think that you’ll be hearing it plenty very soon!

Learn more about Inexpensive SSDs