Silicon Energy 2TB SSD 3D NAND A55 SLC Cache Efficiency Increase SATA III 2.5″ 7mm (0.28″) SSD Inside Stable State Drive (SP002TBSS3A55S25)

Good value
Its super fast and quiet of course.There were some reviews mentioned it lags when writing large files to it. This is true because it does not contain the buffer circuitry on the SAMSUNG ssd drives.This will not be an issue for you if you use Aomei or EaseUS partitions software. There is a box you can check, optimise for ssd, to speed up the cloning massively.My steps to move OS-1 – Clone the System Reserved Partition2 – Clone the OS partitionBe sure not to miss step 1. Of course you can clone the entire drive it is much simpler but I did not do this because it will take forever.What you will want to have in case of boot issues:-Windows PE disc-EasyBCD (critical), and a way to run itSustained write speeds will not be much of an issue for most people once it’s migrated / cloned or setup. If it is an issue for you, shell out the shekels for the Samsung.As all flash memory does, it operates way faster with small files, sustained writes and probably even reads, are going to slow down after about 500mb of file sizeThis is a great value and it will perform fine for most users. Very cool to have and great value I do not regret this purchase even .001%. Would have like to get the Samsung, but its 3X as much money, for what boils down to nearly the same thing, once the drive is clonedMake sure to check optimize for ssd in cloning software. Definitely use fast mode clone (copy files) in Aomei to save yourself hours. I’d probably avoid using clonezilla because it wiped my boot record then failed to clone, and it takes forever in sector clone mode.Do not expect the disc cloning to be easy or fast, it will not be unless you clone entire drive, and if you do that and your drive is huge then prepare to wait overnight if not days. So is why I suggested the steps above. Only took about 30 minutes to clone a 270 gb partition just now.works best to just not delete anything on source disk and you will be fine as long as you are able to run EasyBCD again (make sure that you can!)

Complete Failure – Random Quality Issues – Faulty by Design
FINAL UPDATE: 6/20/2023=====================Well this last batch (23015096) is failing now too with I/O errors on blk_upddate_requests. I am cutting my losses at this point – not even worth RMAing as the new drives they sent back are garbage too. While I could keep claiming RMAs, I have to pay for shipping each time. It’s no longer cost effective to try to get stable drives. $$$ wasted now. Only acceptable solution at this point is a full refund but unfortunately the drives lasted long enough to outlast Amazon’s return policy. (To be clear I am not faulting Amazon for any of this – the fault lies fully with Silicon Power and their garbage SSD line).Drives show no SMART error but fail to handle writes during resilvering. Not suitable for storing data, much less “RAID” use as the product claims.UPDATE: 6/7/2023===============I just received my RMA replacements for the 3 drives drive below – this new batch 23015096 has some changes again, shouldn’t be a surprise by now…Firmware: H220916aSize: 2.05TB/1.86TiBDRAT/DZAT *is* supportedCase is now made of metal instead of plasticQuality remains to be seen and given the extreme variance within the product line my prior review still stands. A potentially OK replacement does not make up for the inability to provide a good product the first time – data is too valuable to risk to random drives.UPDATE: 5/17/2023================I now have 3 more failed drives – all have serial numbers starting with YTAK from batches 23000184 and 23003845. These 3 latest failures powered down during a reboot and then refused to power back on at all. No system recognized them now.For those keeping score, I now only have 3 of these drive left alive, their serials start with AA (2TB, Firmware V0303B0), BB (2.05TB, Firmware SHFM60.0), and BC (2.05TB, Firmware SHFM60.0). Drives BB and BC are from the same batch. The AA drive is the first drive in this line I purchased end of October 2022. The BB/BC drives are from March and April 2023 respectively. The failed three (YTAK drives) are from December 2022 and February 2023. All drives were purchased exclusively from the Silicon Power merchant here on Amazon.The A55 2TB drive line is a complete disaster – do not trust your data to these drives. Regrettably these latest failed drives are under warranty but not within the Amazon return window so I am stuck with a RMA drives which will result in A55 replacements that can’t be trusted…Too bad I have to give at least 1 star for a review – this product doesn’t deserve even 1 star…UPDATE: 5/8/2023===============Verified that batch 23011662 with firmware HPS2704M is bad. All drives in this batch fail with the same errors when subjected around 5 hours of continuous writes. Since there is no way to determine which drive belongs to which batch when ordering (or even if any future batch will resolve this) the product is no longer able to function as intended – it corrupts data when writing.They were nice while they lasted but I can’t rely on drives that change their internal hardware so frequently and then with relatively high probability of producing faulty devices as a result. I may consider them again at some future point but at this point I can’t trust these drives to store my data. Rating is formally reduced to the minimum (1 star) as such a volatile produce design is unacceptable. If you get a good drive it will be fine but drive roulette is not game to be played.UPDATE: 5/7/2023===============Formally reducing review by 1 star (now 3 stars) because of the new 23011662 batch with firmware HPS2704M drives. The drive in my prior review was of this batch and so was it’s replacement. Both drives show ATA errors already (this new one as soon as I plugged it in) and neither drive supports SMART self-tests (prior batches/firmware did – as do ALL other SATA drives I’ve ever used). SP tools do not (yet) recognize these drives so they can’t run tests on them nor is there any new firmware to update to. The ATA error appears to be some sort of bug in the firmware that may not necessarily affect drive functionality so in a slightly risky move I am attempting to resilver onto this new replacement – time will tell if it suffers the same fate as the one it replaced. I also have another unopened drive of this same batch. I will be waiting a little before opening and testing it, pending the results I see here.This represents a significant reduction in quality control and makes me question further purchases. For now I am considering this a batch specific issue but if this continues I may need to review my star rating and find a new drive manufacturer.UPDATE: 5/1/2023===============I have purchased 8 of these drives so far for use in my ZFS pool. Overall I am pleased, especially for the price – they are replacing mechanical drives of comparable specs and as expected greatly outperform the spinning array.Quality control seem to be an issue though – of the 8 drives (technically 9 drives) two have now been defective shortly after arrival. As in showing I/O errors within 10hr of operations. This latest entry had a firmware version of HPS2704M and had ATA errors starting around 4hr resilvering mark (heavy write operations). It also refused to run SMART self tests – a bit odd since it does report SMART data… I might just have bad luck but we shall see as I have more drives to replace. 2 of 9 being faulty isn’t good odds from my personal experience. The drives that work are working fine – no issues there so it seems that so far either they die quickly or work fine.Other interesting bits of information that might be useful to some – I run raidz2 with 8 drives per vdev. This last drive would have been the final replacement to an all flash vdev. I was getting sustained resilver speeds of around 350MB/s for several hours (i.e. up until failure). Back when the vdev was more spinning than flash I was getting speeds around 200MB/s for resilvering to flash and about 70MB/s resilvering to SMR 5400RPM drives – so overall a decent sustained performance despite being DRAMless.UPDATE: 2/6/2023===============The drive with firmware SN12429 (2.05TB) had write errors, only detectable via dmesg and ZFS error counts (SMART, badblocks, self-test, etc. all said everything was fine). Drive had to be RMAed.RMA process was quick and easy. Replacement drive has been received but is using firmware V1031C0 (2.00TB) which lacks DRAT/DZAT (not a big deal, just leaves me a little confused as to which firmware and feature set is supposed to be current and further proves the hardware variance despite using identical models and external appearance).(No firmware updates are available as per their firmware tool.)UPDATE: 1/6/2023===============Since for my use cases the limitations from my original review are acceptable I purchased another of these drives just a couple months later and I am surprised (in a good way) to report that the latest drive I received has a different firmware (possibly controller and/or NAND chips – not going to disassemble to verify).This new drive has firmware SN12429 and is 2.05 TB (1.86TiB) so slightly larger than the older drive. This new drive also DOES support DRAT/DZAT. Trim appears to function on my LSI 9211-8i (IT mode) under ZFS (2.1.4) with this drive.Other than those difference the drive appears to be otherwise identical to the older one. Hopefully this change remains in future drives, if so this is a decent drive for RAID/ZFS home use.Star rating remains unchanged as there is no way to know which version of the drive you have until you plug it in.Original Review (11/1/2022, Still Valid)=======================Does what it should for the most part. It does slow down once you fill the SLC cache (as expected).Plastic casing (common for lower end SSDs) gives it a cheap and non-durable feel. This shouldn’t matter too much unless you are doing a lot of hot swapping of the drive.GParted reports 1.82TiB usable space, the same as the 2TB HDD it replaced (so storage is a true 2TB not 1.92TB like some other “2TB” models – this matters when replacing drives in arrays).Does not support DRAT/DZAT (Deterministic Read ZEROs After TRIM) – meaning no TRIM when connected to an LSI/Broadcom HBA. So while SP claims TRIM/RAID support it won’t fully operate in all cases. Unfortunately the LSI/Broadcom HBAs are quite common and popular.Firmware V0303B0

The SSD drive works well. I use it to back up my portable computer.

Note: does not come with sata3 cablepretty good price-to-performance ratiobuild quality surprisingly managed to endure 2yo daughter somehow climbing a storage shelf and flinging it across the room before a passionate chewing session.maybe don’t let your cat sniff it though, but it might just be residue from the tuna sandwich I had for lunch.tl;dr overall great drive.