Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “IDK what I just bought…”.
Anthony hey, can I borrow USB ( dramatic, music ). I asked for a USB. You have what you need my child. Now go. ( dramatic music ). What is this thing? Has storage chips on it, but none of the interfaces you’d expect from a storage.
Device. Wait. It’S ( indistinct, ), real USB header., But what is this thing Who’s it for? Why did I pay $ 90? For it? Do you know about our sponsor Origin? Pc., Origin? Pcs, all new EVO17-S thin-and-light laptop, can be customized with up to an RTX 3080 Ti a 12th Gen Intel core processor and up to a 17.3 inch, 240 Hertz QHD LED screen., Learn more at the link down below.. This peculiar piece is the Micron e230 USB 2.0 SSD., And it must be the most money that we have ever spent, or at least in the past decade, for eight gigabytes of flash memory.
For the price of just one of these, I could have purchased 20 of These., So what is the deal with this thing? Well, this is, what’s called a USB, DOM or DOM., And it has nothing to do with the much kinkier Sub and Dom you may have heard of, although there are other such terms like master and slave. Man, the tech community am I right DOM in this context, Stands for disc, on module. And in many ways it’s not that different from any other storage drive..
It’S just that you don’t need any additional power or ribbon cables to connect it., It’s just a module with a disc on it that plugs directly into the motherboard kinda. Like an M.2 drive but with much much worse performance., So it’s just a USB drive, but with a wonky connector., Yes, but also no.. There are a couple of key differences at play.
Here.. For starters, this thing is server grid.. The e230 has 15 bit ECC for maintaining data integrity, static and dynamic, wear leveling to extend the lifetime of the device by divvying out the work to all the blocks in the NAND equally and a very specific small form factor.. Let me show you what something like this might be used: for., No no., Oh boy.. Oh there we go.
Yeah it’s a little jank in some servers. They don’t have the little guides, so you just had to kinda line it up and hope that you’re not mashing pins., But of course USB 2.0 pins are very thick, so you don’t really need to worry about mashing them too much., Whatever kinda storage server. You have you’ll have a limited number of SATA and PCIe connections., But you still need something to hold your OS that you’re gon na run right If you are running something like Unraid, which runs entirely in RAM while the system is on. This is the perfect solution for a low cost, reliable boot drive., Just pop it into the USB 2.0 header on your bobo boot into it, and because it will only very occasionally receive reads or writes, it should run reliably for a long time.. Furthermore, this tiny form factor lends itself well to Compact 1U or 2U servers where space’s are premium., Also being server hardware. You get the spec bumps to match across the board, including rate of the operating temperatures, shock and vibration ratings and life expectancy or meantime before failures..
So for a specific person, this is just the thing they were looking for.. It also would be great for super compact embedded systems with specific purposes like this drive even has a screw hole to keep it tightly fastened to the motherboard.. But why not just use any USB drive servers have USB ports right. Well, they do, but generally servers don’t bother with more than two USB ports, so you can plug in a keyboard and mouse., But the real issues are reliability and security..
The second last thing you want is for someone to snag their sweater on the boot drive of a mission, critical machine ripping it out., And the last thing you want is a ne’er-do-well swiping. It inserting some malicious code and plugging it back in.. Another reason USB drives suck for this purpose is they tend to be made out of the absolute worst NAND manufacturers can find., It runs slowly, it’s prone to errors and generally has a very limited lifespan., And this is fine for those cheapo random, USB keys that you Get during your college’s orientation week beside the bowl of condoms., But when you need to you know, do real work, they’re dangerous to rely on., (, beep ). So why do companies sell products that they know are unreliable at all? For a few reasons. You see not all silicon is created equally. And when you’re doing any sort of manufacturing, you’re gon na encounter mistakes and errors that will lead to losses and waste.
Companies want to minimize that waste to maximize profits.. For example, at lttstore.com we sell scrunches made from the scraps from producing our t-shirts.. This not only reduces the amount of material heading to the landfill, but also lets us sell more of the fabric that we purchase for production.. This is something you see all the time in the tech world., For example, with CPUs., Often AMD or Intel, will be trying to produce a bunch of their top of the line multi core CPUs, but due to errors or impurities in the manufacturing process.
Some of those cores aren’t functioning up to spec, resulting in poor performance or instability.. Well, they don’t just throw it. Out., There’s still plenty of meat on that bone. Deactivate the fault cores slap, a new name on it drop the price and baby. You got a skew going..
In fact, binning is what leads to CPUs like the new 12900KS, which is literally just a 12900K but clock a bit faster. In this case, binning isn’t the only factor affecting performance.. Lower quality controllers can also influence speed., And I bet this cheap drive has a very low quality. Controller.. There’S also another reason that these things still go for 90 bucks..
This device uses SLC or single level cell NAND., It’s the most basic form of NAND. That only accepts one bit per memory cell, but it’s also kinda the best., The TLC or QLC NAND in modern SSDs hold three or four bits per memory cell, allowing for much greater storage capacity.. But this comes at the cost of speed and reliability which, in a server setting, isn’t ideal. To see this in action.
We tested this random thumb drive. We have here in CrystalDiskMark, and it ran in about 17.8 megabytes per second or 142 megabits per second, which is less than a third of the max speed of the USB 2.0 spec. And man. Those write speeds are just terrible., They’re, five megabytes per second.. Compare that to this thing, which runs nearly twice the speed for reads and triple the speeds for writes. I mean.
Obviously, all of these numbers pale in comparison to a SATA, SSD or even a USB 3.0 thumb drive, but go easy like this bad boy’s over 10 years old.. Now these days, you would be better off using a sata DOM if you ( laughing ), saying that after that, joke earlier. ( beep ) These days, you would be better off using a sata DOM. If you had the space available in your system and the budget., It serves the same function as a USB DOM, but can read and write much faster or you could use an internal USB 3 header Dom or a normal drive at an internal type, A port something Many modern server motherboards are actually equipped with now.. It all depends on your tolerance to dealing with boot drive rebuilds.. I know. Linus and Jake have experienced multiple drive failures on their Unraid boxes over the years, including some of our servers here., And it’s been a bit of a pain in the butt. Bottom line.
If you’re in the market for a device with higher quality, NAND enterprise level features like ECC and wear leveling and a very specific form factor that allows you to use that last empty port on your motherboard. Well, this is for you.. If you heard literally anyone else, then you might wan na look at our sponsor. Squarespace. Running your own business can be hard, but making your website doesn’t have to be.. Squarespace is an all in one platform that makes it easy to get your website up and running. Quickly. So grow your business online through their marketing features, including SEO support email campaigns and special tools..
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Have you been there Head to squarespace.com/ltt and get 10 % off today, Thanks for watching guys.? This is a well very specific piece of hardware here., So maybe go check out another very specific piece of hardware: the GRE storage controller.. That thing is actually pretty cool, although Wendell from Level 1 Tech had some words to say about it. That I think we should probably consider.. Oh hey look.
This came off., We did it. ( indistinct, ), .