Trying Out A $37 DREVO SSD On Linux

Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of the older benchmarking systems, I decided to try out my first DREVO brand solid-state drive with frankly the I/O performance on this particular system not being too important and being curious how well this sub-$40 SSD performs.

The DREVO X1 60GB SSD I picked up for $37 USD on Amazon, which puts it among the cheapest solid-state drives I have ever purchased or seen for that matter. The 60GB storage is also enough for this particular test system.

The 60GB DREVO X1 SATA 3.0 SSD is rated for 90MB/s writes and 500MB/s reads. It has a four star review on Amazon from 36 reviews, so went ahead and ordered it. DREVO backs the SSD by a three-year warranty and the SSD uses Hynix MLC memory.

The DREVO brand itself has only been around since 2015 and normally wouldn't buy a storage device from a non-trusted brand, but being curious about it and willing to risk it on this test system where there is no important data archived, I figured it would be a fun test candidate.

Formatted to EXT4 and tested with the Linux 4.12 kernel on Ubuntu 17.04, I compared the DREVO X1 to various other SATA 3.0 and NVMe solid-state drives for reference. There's also an old Western Digital SATA 3.0 HDD in there for reference too.

With SQLite, the DREVO X1 is much slower than the other tested SSDs with the exception of the Samsung 950 PRO always performing abnormally poor for SQLite. At least this sub-$40 SSD was still better off than an old HDD.

Random reads put it in line with an ADATA SU800.

Random writes are slow.

And the sequential read performance isn't anything to write home about.

At least it's faster than an HDD while also being more power efficient and cooler.

You can see more benchmarks from this result file. Overall, it's a slow SSD but I really wasn't expecting anything different out of this $38 USD SSD with 60GB capacity -- at least it remains faster than a consumer hard drive. The more important thing is the reliability and if this DREVO brand SSD will hold up for the long-term. I'll update this article if I run into any issues with this DREVO X1 down the road, as it's used by one of the daily benchmark systems in the lab for LinuxBenchmarking.com.

More details on these budget DREVO solid-state drives over on Amazon.