Review on 💾 KOOTION 250GB Portable External SSD: USB-C Solid State Drive for Gaming PC/Mac/Linux/Android with Lanyard Hole by Jeff Wieczorek

KOOTION 250GB USB-C (3.1) Portable External Solid State Drive is a strange device. On the one hand, it's a USB device that looks like a more conventional flash drive. On the other hand, the device claims to be an SSD. So let's get down to business. The KOOTION actuator is beautiful and made entirely of plastic. It is about twice as wide as a "normal" USB stick and about 50% longer. The included USB-C to USB-A cable appears to be of decent quality but is a foot long. The drive has a blue LED and is immediately recognized by Windows 10 (20H2) as a JMicron SCSI drive. Initially I had some problems with the device formatted in exFAT, but reformatting to NTFS fixed them. The PC communicates with the JMicron controller via UASP. When reading and writing STR, the performance was around 370 MB/s (see attached ATTO screenshot). While this performance compares well to something like a mechanical hard drive, it's very suspect. This drive doesn't deliver the 500+ MB/s you expect from ANY SATA SSD. You see, since KOOTION calls it an SSD, you should start unpacking what they have in mind. Sure it's NAND flash, but is it a SATA or NVMe drive or something else like eMMC? In general, the difference lies in the flash controller, namely channel parallelism. Second, there are some other factors, e.g. B. what happens when your flash memory "buffer" area (usually SLC) fills up? So, here's what I found: If you use the drive intermittently, you're fine. With a limited transfer rate (e.g. through 1 Gbit/s LAN) this is fine. However, if you are CONSTANTLY writing to the disk from a source disk that can maximize the STR of KOOTION writes, you will have serious problems around the 10-12GB mark. Basically the drive becomes unresponsive FOR MINUTES presumably when it's wiping its cache, trimming its blocks, or whatever internal Tetris is doing to get it working again. If you happen to be into one of the occasional use cases, you might be wondering why I gave this drive such a bad review. In fact, the reason lies in the fact that for the price of $37, you're getting about $10 more than an M.2 SATA drive + external enclosure that does NOT have any of the poor performance characteristics of KOOTION OR over one normal USB memory with twice the capacity. . Not recommended