- Anthony, hey, can I borrow USB?
(dramatic music)
I asked for a USB?
- You have what you need my child.
Now go.
(dramatic music)
- What is this thing?
Has storage chips on it,
but none of the interfaces you'd expect
from a storage device.
Wait, it's (indistinct) real USB header.
But what is this thing?
Who's it for?
Why did I pay $90 for it?
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- This peculiar piece is the Micron e230 USB 2.0 SSD.
And
it must be the most money
that we have ever spent
or at least in the past decade
for eight gigabytes of flash memory.
For the price of just one of these,
I could have purchased 20 of these.
So what is the deal with this thing?
Well, this is what's called a USB DOM or DOM.
And it has nothing to do with the much kinkier Sub and Dom
you may have heard of,
although there are other such terms
like master and slave.
Man, the tech community, am I right?
DOM in this context stands for disc on module.
And in many ways, it's not that different
from any other storage drive.
It's just that you don't need any additional power
or ribbon cables to connect it.
It's just a module with a disc on it
that plugs directly into the motherboard
kinda like an M.2 drive,
but with much,
much worse performance.
So it's just a USB drive,
but with a wonky connector.
Yes,
but also no.
There are a couple of key differences at play here.
For starters, this thing is server grid.
The e230 has 15 bit ECC for maintaining data integrity,
static and dynamic wear leveling to extend the lifetime
of the device by divvying out the work to all the blocks
in the NAND equally and a very specific small form factor.
Let me show you what something like this might be used for.
No, no.
Oh boy.
Oh, there we go.
Yeah, it's a little jank in some servers,
they don't have the little guides,
so you just had to kinda line it up
and hope that you're not mashing pins.
But of course, USB 2.0 pins are very thick
so you don't really need to worry
about mashing them too much.
Whatever kinda storage server you have,
you'll have a limited number of SATA and PCIe connections.
But you still need something to hold your OS
that you're gonna run, right?
If you are running something like Unraid,
which runs entirely in RAM while the system is on,
this is the perfect solution
for a low cost reliable boot drive.
Just pop it into the USB 2.0 header
on your bobo, boot into it,
and because it will only very occasionally receive reads
or writes, it should run reliably for a long time.
Furthermore, this tiny form factor lends itself well
to Compact 1U or 2U servers
where space's are premium.
Also being server hardware,
you get the spec bumps to match across the board
including rate of the operating temperatures,
shock and vibration ratings
and life expectancy or meantime before failures.
So for a specific person,
this is just the thing they were looking for.
It also would be great for super compact embedded systems
with specific purposes
like this drive even has a screw hole
to keep it tightly fastened to the motherboard.
But why not just use any USB drive
servers have USB ports right?
Well, they do, but generally servers don't bother
with more than two USB ports
so you can plug in a keyboard and mouse.
But the real issues are reliability and security.
The second last thing you want is
for someone to snag their sweater on the boot drive
of a mission critical machine ripping it out.
And the last thing you want is a ne'er-do-well,
swiping it inserting some malicious code
and plugging it back in.
Another reason USB drives suck
for this purpose is they tend to be made
out of the absolute worst NAND manufacturers can find.
It runs slowly,
it's prone to errors,
and generally has a very limited lifespan.
And this is fine for those cheapo random USB keys
that you get during your college's orientation week
beside the bowl of condoms.
But when you need to, you know, do real work,
they're dangerous to rely on.
(beep)
So why do companies sell products
that they know are unreliable at all?
For a few reasons.
You see, not all silicon is created equally.
And when you're doing any sort of manufacturing,
you're gonna encounter mistakes
and errors that will lead to losses and waste.
Companies want to minimize that waste to maximize profits.
For example, at lttstore.com,
we sell scrunches made from the scraps
from producing our t-shirts.
This not only reduces the amount of material heading
to the landfill,
but also lets us sell more
of the fabric that we purchase for production.
This is something you see all the time in the tech world.
For example, with CPUs.
Often AMD or Intel will be trying to produce a bunch
of their top of the line, multi core CPUs,
but due to errors or impurities
in the manufacturing process,
some of those cores aren't functioning up to spec,
resulting in poor performance or instability.
Well, they don't just throw it out.
There's still plenty of meat on that bone.
Deactivate the fault cores, slap a new name on it,
drop the price and baby, you got a skew going.
In fact, binning is what leads
to CPUs like the new 12900KS,
which is literally just a 12900K
but clock a bit faster.
In this case,
binning isn't the only factor affecting performance.
Lower quality controllers can also influence speed.
And I bet this cheap drive
has a very low quality controller.
There's also another reason that
these things still go for 90 bucks.
This device uses SLC or single level cell NAND.
It's the most basic form of NAND
that only accepts one bit per memory cell,
but it's also kinda the best.
The TLC or QLC NAND in modern SSDs hold three
or four bits per memory cell
allowing for much greater storage capacity.
But this comes at the cost of speed and reliability,
which in a server setting, isn't ideal.
To see this in action,
we tested this random thumb drive we have here
in CrystalDiskMark
and it ran in about 17.8 megabytes per second
or 142 megabits per second,
which is less than a third of the max speed
of the USB 2.0 spec.
And man, those write speeds are just terrible.
They're five megabytes per second.
Compare that to this thing,
which runs nearly twice the speed
for reads and triple the speeds for writes.
I mean, obviously all of these numbers pale in comparison
to a SATA SSD or even a USB 3.0 thumb drive,
but go easy like this bad boy's over 10 years old.
Now, these days you would be better off using a sata DOM,
if you,
(laughing)
saying that after that joke earlier.
(beep)
These days you would be better off using a sata DOM,
if you had the space available
in your system and the budget.
It serves the same function as a USB DOM,
but can read and write much faster
or you could use an internal USB 3 header Dom
or a normal drive at an internal type A port,
something many modern server motherboards
are actually equipped with now.
It all depends on your tolerance
to dealing with boot drive rebuilds.
I know Linus and Jake have experienced
multiple drive failures
on their Unraid boxes over the years
including some of our servers here.
And it's been a bit of a pain in the butt.
Bottom line, if you're in the market for a device
with higher quality NAND,
enterprise level features like ECC and wear leveling
and a very specific form factor that allows you
to use that last empty port on your motherboard,
well, this is for you.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
This is a well, very specific piece of hardware here.
So maybe go check out another
very specific piece of hardware,
the GRE storage controller.
That thing is actually pretty cool,
although Wendell from Level 1 Tech had some words
to say about it that I think we should probably consider.
Oh, hey look, this came off.
We did it (indistinct).