Verbatim VI550 S3 1TB Review

TL;DR

Verbatim VI550 S3 is a great comeback for the brand. The Verbatim VI550 S3 shows a strong potential for breathing a new lease of life into the old computers. Even the pricing is set to be competitive with the rest of the competition. Speaking of the competition, we have the WD Green, the ADATA SU650, and SanDisk SSD Plus series. All of these drives have a similar setup on the inside except for some which do have a cache to help speed up sustained writes. As of now, the Verbatim VI550 S3 offers a great deal of value for your money. And is an SSD, worth your while to take a look at. We are sure the SSD will do very well once it has collected enough popularity and reach.

We give the Verbatim VI550 S3 a solid 8 out of 10.

Brand Overview

Let us start the review by giving a bit of an overview of the brand, Verbatim is a brand for storage media and flash memory products currently owned by CMC Magnetics Corporation (CMC), a Taiwanese company that is known for optical disc manufacturing. An agreement was announced in 2019 to sell Verbatim's global business and assets to CMC Magnetics at an estimated price of $32 million USD. Verbatim earned a lot of name and fame with their Floppy disks.

Specifications and Features

Below is a list of specifications sourced from the Verbatim for this drive. Out of the gate, we have the 1TB drive (931 GiB), using the SATA III 6Gb/s interface, which is also backward compatible with SATA II. The VI550 SSD 3D TLC NAND which Phison’s PS3111-S11T controller controls. This controller was last updated on 2016/08/17.

Speeds on the drive can get up to 550/520 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, and up to 87K/94K IOPS using 4K random reads/writes. Not too shabby there! Another point to note here is that MTBF (system reliability) comes in at around an astonishing number of 2,000,000 hours.

VI550 S3 1TB SSD Specifications

WARRANTY:- Verbatim offers a 3-year limited warranty on this SSD. It is however yet to be confirmed, whether or not, the application of the SSD in proof of time and space storage mining will be voiding your warranty. FYI GALAX has declared that it will not be entertaining warranty claims on SSDs, used in storage mining. However, how the usage scenario of a faulty SSD shall be determined, isnt clear. I think its more of a warning designed to be a deterrent to handle the ever-so-rising SSD demands (as per the report from Tom’s Hardware sales of high-capacity SSDs from Adata have increased as much as 500%)

Packaging and Product Tour

Retail packaging isnt anything exciting it shows the name of the product, form factor, capacity, interface, and maximum advertised sequential read and writes speeds (yeah that’s a lot of text right on the top of the product. On the back, it shows more drive information and specifications. On opening it up, we are greeted with the SSD sitting securely in a plastic tray along with a booklet of the user guide and installation instructions.

The looks of the drive itself, like pretty much any SSD, don’t really have much to get excited about, particularly a plain black one with a sandblasted matte finish. The product name once again is mentioned as “VERBATIM VI550 S3 SSD” in font right at the center breaking up the monotony of the black drive and offeringsss somewhat of an asymmetrical look. But again, it’s an SSD, it’s not exactly something whose looks matter.

As per the looks of the inside, we don’t really have much data on it, as there weren’t really any screws (at least none were visible). From the looks of it, it relies on a more traditional friction lock tab. I didn’t test my luck by ripping it apart, as I don’t have much of that stuff.

Let’s jump over to the good stuff now:-

Testing and Benchmarks

Test System

Here is the breakdown of the components used in our test bench.

Test Method

The SSD is formatted before and after each benchmark to make sure we get the best results possible. We do this before each and every test runs to give the SSD the best environment possible for testing. Below is the list of tests we are going to run on this SSD.

1. ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES

2. ATTO DISK

3. CRYSTAL DISKMARK

4. AIDA RANDOM READ

5. AS SSD

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a powerful tool that was designed in order to provide a simple means of assessing the read and writer performance of your Solid State Drive or Hard Disk Drive.

The benchmark tool helps in monitoring and checking the response time of a disk as well as viewing the system information collected using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

ATTO

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark for Windows to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools in the industry Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage.

CRYSTAL DISK MARK

CrystalDiskMark is an open-source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows. Based on Microsoft’s MIT-licensed Diskspd tool, this graphical benchmark is commonly used for testing the performance of solid-state storage. It works by reading and writing through the filesystem in a volume-dependent way. It generates read/write speeds in sequential and random positions with varying numbers of queues and threads. Solid-state drives tend to excel at random IO, as unlike hard drives it does not need to seek the specific position to read from or write to.

AIDA RANDOM READ

With this module, we can measure the performance of the PC’s storage devices, including (S)ATA or SCSI hard disk drives, RAID arrays, optical drives, solid-state drives (SSD), USB drives, and memory cards. It also allows us to perform write tests, which helps us detect fake products and errors on the devices. In order to attain reliable benchmark results, we have to make sure to close all background applications.

AS SSD

AS SSD Benchmark reads/writes a 1 GByte file as well as randomly chosen 4K blocks. Additionally, it performs the tests using 1 or 64 threads and it determines the SSD’s access time.

Two extra benchmark tests examine the drive’s behavior when copying a few big files, a lot of small files, and a mixture of file sizes by using cached copy functions of your OS as well as reading/writing data depending on the data’s compressibility.

OUR VERDICT

We give the Verbatim VI550 S3 a solid 8 out of 10.

GALLERY