Zheino M3-128 GB mSATA SSD

For a few reasons, I needed an mSATA SSD. I first looked at local stores, then at stores on AliExpress. I came across various brands, but noticed that many sellers offered drives from a brand I hadn't heard of before: Zheino. There were quite a lot of them, and the prices were pretty reasonable. I found a seller with a large number of sales, bought one, received it, and decided to share it with everyone.
An inspection, some tests, and a few conclusions.


The SSD market today reminds me of the hard drive market 20–25 years ago, when it seemed like everyone and their dog was making them. But making hard drives and making SSDs are two very different things. The problem is that hard drives require precision mechanics, and as capacities grew, the required precision only increased. This partly led to most manufacturers leaving the market or merging with larger companies, such as the well-known Qantum.

To show I'm not making this up, here are just a few hard drive models from well-known companies. Did you know they made them?
Alps


Kyocera


Olivetti


And that's not even counting the many lesser-known companies, such as Syquest techology.


This company even made a rather unique device: a hybrid of a hard drive and a disk drive, with a replaceable cartridge containing the actual disks.


And where are those drives now? And some of those companies, for that matter?

Things are much simpler with SSDs: you buy a board design, flash memory, a controller, and a few other components. Then it all gets soldered onto the board, often by machine, the firmware is loaded, and the drive is ready. Some “manufacturers” make it even simpler: they stick on a label with their company name, and voilà—a “new brand” is born!

I suspect the Zheino under review belongs to that last category, although the packaging says the company makes many different types of drives.

But let's get to the review.
The SSD comes in a familiar-looking box that's much larger than the drive itself. I'll also note the fast shipping and delivery: I placed the order on September 7, and picked it up at the post office on the 22nd.


There were two versions to choose from, M3 and Q3, but I wanted 128 GB, and that's only available in the M3 series. Its advertised speed is also slightly higher. When I ordered it, the SSD cost a little over $30; now the price has dropped to $27. If I'd known, I would have waited a bit.

I couldn't find a way to switch to English, so here's the product page description translated by Google. The model under review is highlighted.


Inside is a plastic tray, clearly with a compartment for a screwdriver, though no screwdriver is included.


The only things included are the SSD itself and a couple of small screws in a sealed compartment in the tray.


There's nothing particularly remarkable about the SSD's appearance; it's a standard mSATA drive. The board also has additional contact pads, next to which is an LED indicating that power is present.


Another LED is installed near the interface connector, but this one indicates drive activity.
The controller is an SM2258XT-G-AB, and the board has four 29F32B2ALCTH2 flash memory chips. According to indirect information, these are Intel 29F32B2ALCTH2 3D TLC B16A chips.


The following information was taken from the controller's datasheet.


Judging by the more detailed description, the controller is indeed designed to work with 3D TLC memory, so the assumption about the type of chips checks out.


For the test setup, I used the mini PC I reviewed recently, with a 2.5-inch 120 GB Kingston SSD as the system drive.


The drive was, of course, unpartitioned to begin with, so before testing I opened Disk Management and created a partition.


In the end, I got a drive with 119 GB of formatted capacity.


The drive model name seems to have been picked almost at random; the manufacturer didn't even bother to program in a halfway decent name, such as its own “brand” name.
It shows 3 hours of use and some amount of data written and read. Since the amounts written and read are roughly equal, I assume the drive was tested after manufacture.


General information from SSD-Z.


I also ran the first tests in SSD-Z, since it has a built-in benchmark.


Next are tests with more familiar software, starting with CrystalDiskMark.
First is a screenshot from the product page, followed by my two screenshots using 1 GB and 32 GB test files. The results are roughly in line with the advertised figures. The difference may be because the seller's screenshot shows the Q3 model (judging by its capacity), while mine is the M3.


I'll digress briefly here.
I used to use AS SSD Benchmark quite often, but starting with this review, I won't be using it anymore. The reason is that this program can kill a drive—not directly, of course, but indirectly, all the same.
The thing is, it runs both sequential read/write tests and small-file tests over the entire amount of data specified for the test. So you get a scenario like this: set a 10 GB test file and start the test. Since the small-file test also processes a total of 10 GB, the test takes a very long time. The drive heats up, and the heat can cause the flash memory to fail during a read. The controller interprets this as a drive failure and locks it in read-only mode. Near the end of the test, a software error dialog pops up, the computer freezes completely, and you reboot it using the power button—only to find that the drive is now read-only, even though Windows starts up normally.
I might have thought I was mistaken, but I've already killed two drives this way, with capacities of 256 and 128 GB. I tested the first one two years ago and thought it was just a fluke. But when I recently saw the exact same scenario play out again, I had no doubts left. So I don't recommend using this program, especially with a large test file.

Below is a screenshot of a test run with this program, taken from the product page.


Another test, using Anvils Storage Utilities with a 12 GB test file.


And, of course, the fairly familiar HD Tune.
A test run with a 64 GB file showed that the drive's write speed drops after 42 GB, which is roughly one-third of its capacity. After that, write speed is 50 MB/s, compared with 400–450 MB/s before the drop.


The read graph is fairly flat across the entire capacity.


But the write graph is quite strange. Above, you saw another nice write graph, from the test where I checked the file size at which the speed drops. The speed was also tested across the entire capacity, but on an unpartitioned drive.


Consecutive runs—whether started right away or after a reboot, even after creating and deleting a partition—produced different results. However, they were broadly similar to one another.


Finally, a real-world write test: copying files of different sizes using Windows.
1. A 7.33 GB file to an empty drive.
2. A 14.6 GB file to an empty drive
3. A 9 GB file to a drive with about 15 GB already in use.

The files were copied from a new Kingston SSD.


During testing, I shut down the computer and noticed something: when shut down through the operating system, my mini PC doesn't cut power to the mSATA port, as shown by the two LEDs lit on the drive's circuit board. The only way to cut power is to disconnect the computer completely.


That wraps up this SSD review. Judging by the test results, the drive broadly matches the seller's claims. There are some minor differences, but they're probably due to the fact that I tested a slightly different SSD model and used a different version of the test software (though that has much less impact).
Overall, everything works fine, but two things are disappointing:
1. Write speed drops to 50 MB/s when working with large files. The drop itself isn't the problem—that's normal. The problem is that it drops all the way to 50 MB/s.
2. A very strange write graph in the test with an unpartitioned drive.

On the plus side, it uses Intel memory (judging by the markings), has pretty good speed, and is inexpensive: $27 for 128 GB and $47 for 256 GB.


I hope you found this review useful. As always, I look forward to your questions in the comments.