Goldenfir T650 128GB SSD – Review and Teardown
The PC market is now flooded with various cheap SATA SSD models, no-name brands and many knock-offs, however among all of them there is some “known” popular Chinese brands selling products on websites like AliExpress for many years. One of the most known cheap SSD brand is Goldenfir – being on the market for years, there’s mixed user reviews about the quality of the drives itself (as expected from a Chinese low cost SSD of course).
The main issue with cheap SSDs, is that you don’t really know what you get – the specs differs, two identical drives can have different NAND chips, controllers, firmware etc, fake capacity and so on.
Now on the topic, I like to buy and test cheap hardware and here is my latest purchase – a brand new $8 (7 euro) 2.5″ SATA Goldenfir 128GB SSD from AliExpress (the cheapest 128GB SSD on the market) which I will use mainly to test different operating systems on various laptops, it will not be my daily OS drive LOL – let’s play with it now.
Here’s the package, it has a red Goldenfir logo and some details on it, inside is the actual box containing the SSD itself (there is even an user manual) – seems legit:
The SSD itself is made all of just plastic with stickers on both sides, including the drive details:
Goldenfir Solid State Drive / Model T650-128GB / Interface SATA III 6GB/s:
Now, let’s open it and observe the PCB inside:
As you can see from the photos, there’s two NAND chips and the controller (as for a 128GB SSD, so no more NAND chips on the backside and NO DRAM). The PCB is marked as GF-1825-85N-V2.0-2L and the controller is Yeestor YS9085N (used in many other popular SSDs like Patriot, Netac, Apacer, XrayDisk and many more), the both NAND chips have an unknown markings of DD2312V76:
I connected the SSD on my Lenovo ThinkPad T420 laptop as a second drive using the HDD caddy (SATA III), the first thing that got my attention (after converting the empty drive to GPT and format it) was that CrystalDiskInfo and Hard Disk Sentinel recognized the drive just as “SSD 128GB”, there is no Goldenfir anywhere in the model name or specs:
Here’s the CrystalDiskMark benchmark results of the 128GB Goldenfir T650 SSD, not bad at all (of course on an empty drive):
The most interesting part to me was to check what’s the NAND brand used inside, so I used the tool “sg_flash_id-v0.143a” (DOWNLOAD HERE) and got an interesting results:
Drive: 1(ATA)
Model: SSD 128GB
Firmware: HT3618C1
Size: 122104 MB [128.0 GB]
From smart: [May 23 2023]
From ATA id: 0xad,0x7e,0x28,0xb,0x0,0xc0,0x0,0x0 – Hynix 3dv7-176L TLC 16k 512Gb/CE 512Gb/die
Controller : – (1)
Bank00: 0xad,0x7e,0x28,0xb,0x0,0xc0,0x0,0x0 – Hynix 3dv7-176L TLC 16k 512Gb/CE 512Gb/die
Bank04: 0xad,0x7e,0x28,0xb,0x0,0xc0,0x0,0x0 – Hynix 3dv7-176L TLC 16k 512Gb/CE 512Gb/die
To my surprise, the used NAND chips are Hynix 3dv7-176L TLC 16k 512Gb, which is a TLC 3D NAND flash memory from SK hynix (South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory chips and flash memory chips), not bad for a cheap $8 (7 euro) SSD!
Final words: I am in no way affiliated with anything listed above (as products and brands), so if you’re planning on purchasing the same cheap Goldenfir SSD keep in mind that there is a chance you will receive a drive with completely different PCB and NAND chips inside (different speed ratings, capacity etc.) that’s common for almost every Chinese SSD manufacturer. As an advice, I will suggest to buy nothing bigger than 512GB as most of them are with fake capacity, ideally stay withing the 128-256GB range of cheap SSDs.