120 GB M.2 SSD from RECADATA

A brief review of a relatively small drive from an unknown (at least to me) company, RECADATA. Nothing extraordinary, just a small SSD. Inspection, tests, and conclusions.


I’ve already reviewed a similar drive from KingDian. Although it’s not a very large company, it is at least a known brand. This time, though, I got my hands on a “dark horse,” so I was simply curious to see what it could do and how it worked.

There’s really nothing to unpack: just a small board inside an antistatic bag. At first I even wondered whether there was actually anything inside, but it turned out there was :)


These are the technical specifications from the product page. I don’t see any point in translating them; I think the tests will tell us more.


The board uses the M.2 2280 form factor. There’s a sticker on top, along with a flash memory chip.


There’s nothing on the bottom, but I noticed that the sticker is very close to the contacts. It doesn’t actually get in the way, but it’s really close.


The controller is from ASolid Technology; I haven’t come across one of these before. The product description lists SATA 6Gbps.


The description claimed that it uses 3D TLC flash memory made by Intel. The chip on the board is marked 29F01T2ANCTH2, and chips like this are used in Intel SSDSC2KW256G8. That drive has a capacity of 256 GB implemented with two chips, while this one gets 120 GB from a single chip.

There is no cache memory.


Block diagram of the controller used.


I installed the drive in a computer, created a partition and formatted it as usual. The resulting formatted capacity is 111 GB (120000000000/1024/1024/1024=111.75).


The general information didn't show anything interesting; the power-on count and operating time are mine. The temperature is shown as 44 degrees, but it doesn't actually change—the drive has no temperature sensor.


Basically the same information, this time from SSD-Z. I took the screenshot a little later, so the operating time is already 9 hours :)


The first tests, also from SSD-Z.


The product page had a CrystalDiskMark screenshot very similar to the one on the left here, except that in my test the write speed was about 10% higher with the same file size, which is rather surprising.
But the results are somewhat worse when testing with a 32 GB file, as expected. The read speed barely changed, while the write speed dropped to 100 MB/s.


A couple of other programs showed even lower results.
AS SSD reported read speeds of 378 MB/s and write speeds of 85 MB/s.


Anvils Storage came up with just 356/71.
To rule out the effect of the Windows cache, I used test files 2–3 times larger than the computer's RAM.


HD Tune Pro, however, produced a rather strange result. For example, I could only run the first part of this test; measuring the block size consistently returned an I/O error.


All right, let's run a separate read test. It shows about 500 MB/s, just as CrystalDiskMark did.


I deleted the partition and tested writing to the unpartitioned drive.
HD Tune Pro again produced a strange result: a linear write speed of about 450 MB/s across the entire capacity.

Someone once asked me why I test with different programs. Well, this is basically the answer: sometimes programs can be wrong.


And finally, a more illustrative test: let's try copying an approximately 8 GB file to the test SSD using Windows itself.
You can clearly see that after about 5–6 GB, the speed drops sharply, and the rest of the copy proceeds at 70–75 MB/s, which is much more realistic.


That wraps up the experiments. Here's the test subject installed in its intended device :)


And now for the conclusions.
In my opinion, this is a pretty good SSD with TLC memory made by Intel. It doesn't get hot during use; my only complaint is the sharp drop in speed when working with large files.

The price is about the same as what you'd pay locally, perhaps a little lower. For example, the cheapest Western Digital Green SSD 120GB with TLC memory, including shipping, comes to about $53.5–54. The Chinese option is only competitive if you use points, coupons and other perks; otherwise, it's easier to buy one locally with a warranty.

That's all. I hope you found the review useful.