I did not see anywhere including reddit that discussed what is inside the Orico Y20 SATA SSD so I popped the top and took some teardown pictures.
I picked up the 128GB version for 9 bucks on black friday to have a spare use it for whatever drive.
As far as how does it perform? I mean it’s a 128GB drive so it’s not like it’s really all that relevant. I would do some tests, but I’ve only used it in a USB enclosure in VMs so far. Passing the USB port was the only way I could figure out to be able to swap data between the two while they’re isolated at the network level.
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Were there any manufacturer logos on the nand?
Who makes the chips?
That drive and more importantly the controller looks similar to these.
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Recently used one for pitching coaching sharing to a sports agent. Sustained at SATA is 400 MB/s on read, mixed the speeds dip to 350ish. Zero speed difference on USB-C bridge in a Mini PC of the Beelink kind.
The upside is more stable than the junk SanDisk Plus/Ultra II controllers 
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The NAND has no markings aside from the numbers as you see in the photos. The drive really falls flat on it’s face with large writes. I don’t think I’ll be buying any more of them.
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It was $75 for 2TB a week ago on ebay and I couldn’t think of anything else to use the ebay $10 off they sent me so figured why not.
I already have their J-10 and J-20 drives which have lasted well enough so far so more confident in their brand now. Those two run hot with their realtek controllers though, so large heatsinks necessary.
This runs so slow it barely gets warm.
It runs at full speed for almost half the capacity but yes it drops to 75MB/s once the cache runs out, pretty standard for cheapest qlc.
Did a full fill with disk-filltest, ok so far.
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Here’s an entertaining but serious review of the Goldenfir 120 GB model (this one has a YS9082HP controller so not exactly the same):
TL;DR: It sucks.
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The 1TB Intel 670P is often priced at $33 at places like Micro Center.
This really dates it lol, 2023 was a very long time ago in ssd time, I was getting 2TB 670p’s for ~$65 back then, and to be fair even those drop to under 100MB/s when the slc cache is filled over usb.
That was during the ssd glut.
I doubt it was really $3, back then they would give introductory discounts to sign up new customers.
Things move fast, even bad controllers aren’t that bad now. China is behind, but Deepseek/manus are just indications they are rapidly gaining ground. Their nand quality since that time is night and day, they are barely behind korea if Samsung is licensing their technology.
They really missed a trick not trying to brick the drive by seeing how much they could write to it.
These guys do that.
They might be using a different chip combo on higher density than just QLC, on the non-QLC SSDs some boards use 4 chips for 2TB and 2x quadcore controller chipset. The only Realtek SSD I had is a 500GB if I recall and the QLC performed sub-90MB so its likely a single core controller to drop to that.
The risk on QLC SSDs or budget SSDs is if that controller chip SLC cache fails from usage it’ll drop speeds to eMMC level ranges. Last budget SSD I used the cache had been similar to an eMMC, 32-64MB cache.
You are getting much better speeds than I do on the 120GB version. (though this is to be expected and why I have told my friends never to buy small drives and consider 1TB the minimum size today)
This is the start of copying large files until the drive is full.
And this is once the cache is exhausted. It pretty much bounces between 10 and 40 so it’s probably averaging around 20.
Considering I primarily got this drive to use like a floppy disk for larger files - it’s certainly not that great of an experience. Oh and while I’m typing this it just dropped to bouncing between 5 and 30 instead of 10 and 40.
Was going to add another image nearer the time it was finished but I have to bring cat to vet in about half an hour and this was a two batch job so I’m going to go ahead and stop it at a clean cutoff, move the stuff off it to the other machine and start the second batch so it’s copying while I’m out of the house. At this point there’s sufficient evidence that it’s old SD card levels of slow once the cache is exhausted.
