ADATA Ultimate SU630, 240GB 2.5" Internal SATA Solid State Drive

I bought this to revive an old HP Laptop with a Core 2 Duo and 4GB RAM. Yes, this laptop is about 10 years old.The original hard drive was dead, so I picked this up as a quick replacement. To my surprise, this drive has exceeded expectations over the last few weeks. It also allows us to run Windows 10 home on this laptop with no issues.Honestly, the value proposition for this drive is immense. You aren't going to get the fastest read/write speeds, but for the price, it does the job where needed.

For the money, it is a good solid state drive. No issues and easy to install. Unless you need tons of storage, this is a good hard drive. Would buy again without hesitation

For the low price I paid for this drive the speeds are great for basic laptop or desktop use, obviously much better then using a traditional hard drive. Even the smallest size of this drive is very fast. The endurance is lower then other drives you can buy but shouldn't be a problem for normal laptop or desktop use just to browse the web / edit documents and other basic tasks for a couple years till you are going to replace the computer in question anyways.This is one of the first QLC drives on the market. QLC stores 4 bits per cell versus previous TLC (3 bits per cell) , and MLC (2 bits per cell). Because of the difficulty from storing more bits per cell the amount of times it can reuse / rewrite over each area is decreased vs TLC / MLC, but modern solid state drives do a good job of leveling the wear across the whole drive so this shouldn't be an issue for normal use inside a laptop or a desktop for a couple of years, but this drive should not be used in a server nor in any situation where the whole drive gets frequently erased or rewritten.There is a good short news article on anandtech about this specific drive that mentioned that it uses NAND from Intel which should be very high quality because Intel is already using their QLC NAND in drives it is selling to large enterprise customers. The drive uses a Maxio controller with pseudo-SLC caching which seemed to work well as the drive met its quoted write specs.I purchased the 240gb drive which is the smallest size because i am only using this in a work laptop. Even though the 240gb version is the smallest size it is still very fast and as fast as the larger sizes. The drive did not warm up at all when running crystal diskmark for a few minutes. As you can see from the attached picture of the cystal diskmark results it read at 560MB/s and wrote at 478MB/s which is slightly faster read then in the specs, and almost as fast as sata3-600MB/s allows. I ran crystal diskmark an hour after installing windows 10, so the drive may have had time to fully refresh the cache.

It was very easy to use, just had to plug it in to an empty storage slot and it worked as soon as it got power