An Introduction to BIWIN and Its Newest SSD

David_Schroth

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Introduction One of the last stops that we made at CES 2023 was to visit BIWIN’s suite to find out a bit more information about them and to finally sort out what the deal is with the Acer Predator and HP products that they have been selling in the US market. Of note, we’ve previously […]

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Interesting.

I actually have an old BIWIN M.2 SATA drive in my pfSense router.

It's a 60GB unit. One of these.

1676253604168.png

pfSense only uses like 4GB of the disk, and isnt disk intensive, so I didn't want to waste money on more SSD than I needed. I considered using a 8GB DOM or something like that, but those actually wound up costing more than this thing did.

I essentially bought it only because it was the smallest and cheapest SSD (that would fit in an m.2 slot or as a DOM, I didn't want a SATA drive with a power connector to worry about) on either Amazon or Newegg at the time of purchase in 2017.

It cost me ~$40 back in 2017, so I was happy it kept the costs down. It takes a little long to boot, but that doesn't bother me too much, and anyway, that might just be a pfSense thing and not a Biwin thing. Since then I have a spare 256GB Inland premium m.2 drive kicking around. If I have the spare time some day, I may just install that instead, and see if it speeds up the boots at all.

Smart is still reporting it at 100% life remaining, 6 years later, but I'm not sure if I trust the output, because at the same time it only says that there are 500113 LBA's written (244MB) on a drive that has 4GB of data on it. It also only claims to have 1464 power on hours (61 days), but has been in near 24/7 use since 2017 :p

Hopefully their newer, more capable and pricier drives are better in this regard :p

To be fair to this drive, it has been in use 24/7 for almost 6 years now, which means it is doing orders of magnitude better than every OCZ drive I ever owned :p
 
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