Review on Zheino mSATA SSD 512GB M3 Mini SATA SSD: Reliable Internal Solid State Drive for Mini PC, Notebooks, and Tablets by Mike Lunde

I recently decided to upgrade the mSATA drives in my three Samsung Series 9 Ultrabooks from circa 2011-2013. I saw this Zheino 256GB mSATA while looking for replacement mSATA drives. For less than $40 I decided to try this device on my 11.6 inch Core i3, 2011 Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook NP900X1A-A01US and compare the performance to more expensive branded devices running on my other 9 Series computers are to be found. Experience Zheino's drive Performance is equivalent to mSATA SSDs of similar brands at a price reduction of 45%. Zheino's specifications look beautiful with a somewhat unusual design. When installed, the drive's component side faces down. There are two LEDs on the back of the circuit board. A bright red LED on the edge indicates power, as well as a dimmer drive activity indicator that lights up when the drive is idle and blinks when the drive is being accessed. The component side is down and the LED side is useful for monitoring the status of the drive, but that may have something to do with the disc's Achilles' heel. To swap drives, I installed the drive in a Zheino USB 3.0 to mSATA enclosure and then ran Acronis True Image to partition and clone the factory 64GB drive. Everything started well, but I quickly realized that something was wrong. The cloning process slowed down to a bare minimum and finally took over an hour to clone 40GB of data from the original SSD. I found it strange, but when the cloning process was finally completed, I proceeded to install the Zheino hard drive into the computer. The installation and the subsequent start of Windows went without incident. Windows has recognized the new SSD correctly, automatically installed all the necessary drivers and that's it. I ran the CrystalDiskMark test and the results, while not impressive, were acceptable for this particular computer with a 300GB/s SATA bus limit. Or I thought the performance was acceptable until I started copying files to a new drive. The transfer started normally, but the transfer speed dropped quickly until the transfer rate reached 16MB/s or less. In fact, the Zhenio mSATA SSD was SLOWER when writing files than when writing to the micro SD card! At that point, I ordered a third-party drive for my computer and chose the Zheino SSD for fast portable storage. An alternative drive arrived that cloned the original SSD in about 10 minutes and it works great. Unfortunately, the Zheino SSD turned out to be pretty useless as an external storage device. Just like installing on a computer, the speed of writing files quickly decreased to the speed of writing to a card less than SD. I ran CrystalDiskInfo and found the problem: HEAT. When connected to the Zheino mSATA enclosure board, the drive temperature shows 46°C (115°F) during cold boot. After just a few seconds of data logging, the drive's temperature rises to 60°+C (142°F) and begins to throttle due to overheating. Is it really that hot or is it just a bad block with a bad temp sensor? I'm not sure about that. It doesn't feel particularly hot and it's hard to believe that it turns on at 115°F. At this point I thought I must have received a defective unit and asked for a replacement. Unfortunately, the replacement block behaves just like the original. Transfers start quickly, the drive overheats and then starts to lag. The second drive managed to maintain a write speed of 35MB/s compared to 16MB/s on the first device. Slightly better, but still overheats/throttles and pales in comparison to the 250-350MB/s transfer rates achieved with other drives in the same enclosure. The original Zheino device experienced overheating/throttling issues both when installed directly into a computer and when installed in a Zheino external USB 3.0 to mSATA drive enclosure. However, as a final test to rule out this particular case as a problem, I replaced the drive with a different enclosure without any modifications. Other brand SSDs work great when installed in the same enclosure. Based on my experience with two separate devices, the Zheino 256GB mSATA SSD is an extremely poor choice for an mSATA SSD. Both devices suffered from overheating and throttling issues. Both are literally slower than writing to a fast SD card. The Zheino SSD is a steal, but with its overheating/throttling issues and low data transfer rates of 15-35MB/s, you get what you pay for here. — DB