When you’re working in IT and doing computer repairs, sometimes when you are sourcing parts – in this case a 512 GB SATA SSD – you come across lesser-known branded drives that are cheaper than the named brands like Samsung, Kingston, Crucial, et al.
Amazon was offering a Prime discount on the ORICO Y20 SATA Solid State Drives so I ordered a bunch of them. What could possibly go wrong?
Uh oh.
Yeah. Uh oh, alright.
So here’s the gist of it – it’s a fairly competent SSD, I’ll give it that – it sits in the low-med tier. Read and write speeds are fairly competent. However, something was off from the first minute of it being put into service.
Usually when you plug in a SSD and look at it via Task Manager or even the (UEFI) BIOS, it’d say something like “Crucial BX500… [500 GB]”. This SSD just reported “ORICO [500 GB]”.
Kinda awkward if you have few of these SSDs and they don’t report their model correctly. (The model, SSD! WHAT MODEL ARE YOU?! – Coburn, allegedly.)
Taking a look at smartctl identification data on Linux (I use arch btw) confirms my theory:
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.13.3-arch1-1] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: ORICO Serial Number: YVHW5M2VATEJQHNQ2C5P LU WWN Device Id: 0 000000 000000000 Firmware Version: HP3618C1 User Capacity: 512,110,190,592 bytes [512 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Rotation Rate: Solid State Device Form Factor: 2.5 inches TRIM Command: Available Device is: Not in smartctl database 7.3/5528 ATA Version is: ACS-4 T13/BSR INCITS 529 revision 5 SATA Version is: SATA 3.2, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Fri Mar 28 12:12:34 2025 AEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled
See how the Device Model field just says “ORICO”? A proper drive would say, if we use the Crucial drive again, Crucial BX500-something. This one just announces its manufacturer name. Have three of them, and they’ll all be “ORICO”. Annoying.
Okay, that nerd talk aside. Let’s actually get onto the sketchiness of the actual drive.
Looks can be deceiving
So, the story is that I was called out to do a data clone on a laptop to a new SSD because their existing hard disk was packing it in and running really slowly. Armed with one of these drives, I drove out to the site.
After unpacking my tools, I disassembled the clients’ laptop and installed the SSD. The laptop was a old-ish laptop but still very capable for the clients’ needs. Newer is not always better.
Clone started and True Image reported that’ll take less than 1 hour to complete to clone over about 200GB of System and User data from the original HDD (now attached via a USB 3.0 Caddy) to the new SSD which was just installed.
Things seemed to be progressing well, light conversation with the client ensued, I checked my iPad for emails and had a quick glance at my ever-huge list of message notifications on Discord. I checked a few other things.
However, it was about 40 minutes into the operation and we only had done ~30% of the job. This is where the first red flag popped.
True Image was having a bit of a seizure between “24 hours remaining”, “3 hours remaining”, “15 minutes”… you get the idea.
That’s not an SSD I want in a client machine
I went back to looking at my iPad and doing some remote admin work dismissing the slowness. Pop red flag no. 2!
Progress slowly continued, until a dreaded foe appeared:
TARGET DEVICE IO ERROR /dev/sda - Write Timeout Abort / Retry / Continue
Uh oh. The SSD failed to tell the kernel that it had finished a write request – since we need to write the data in memory to the SSDs’ physical flash memory cells – in time, causing the kernel to stomp and report a timeout error.
Pop another 3 red flags, because the same error occurred three more times. FUN!
Since Acronis True Image is based on Linux (at least the version I was using), I checked the kernel logs and sure enough, the kernel reported Write Timeouts. Looking at the SMART error logs, sure enough the controller also recorded them:
Error 2 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 0 hours (0 days + 0 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an unknown state. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 84 40 f8 f8 17 82 00 at LBA = 0x008217f8 = 8525816 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- 61 00 f8 f8 17 82 40 08 00:38:03.330 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED 61 00 f0 f8 0f 82 40 08 00:38:03.320 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED 61 f8 e8 00 08 82 40 08 00:38:03.320 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED 61 00 e0 00 00 82 40 08 00:38:03.310 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED 61 00 d8 00 f8 81 40 08 00:38:03.310 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
This translated means that the SSD failed to answer the doorbell, and the controller got upset at it. Usually this issue is related to a controller problem or the physical flash memory is faulty in the SSD, but I really don’t know.
What I find also odd is that the power-on lifetime timer still says 0 days, 0 hours. It must not have the capability to keep a lifetime timer.
Partially scared, I clicked Continue and prayed that the Windows installation that was being cloned over wouldn’t crash on startup because we all know Windows is very finnicky when it comes to this sort of thing.
The clone eventually succeeded after 3 hours-ish of waiting and I was able to boot back into Windows 7 like nothing had ever happened, just with a Nitro injection-ish.
The haunting
As I drove back to headquarters from the client that afternoon, I couldn’t shake the grip of the thought of the ORICO SSD randomly committing suicide and taking the data down with it – there’s tons of photos and emails on that drive I just cloned over.
And the quality of the drive, especially after seeing the 3 write timeout errors was very much in question. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it could kick the bucket at the worse possible moment without any warning…
I called the client later that week and said I’ll swap the SSD over to… you guessed it… a 500 GB Crucial BX500 drive that haven’t let me down. Back at the office, I did the clone over and things progressed much quicker than before.
So far haven’t heard from the client that it has shat the bed or anything. I’ll take that as a win and the haunting of the ORICO drive is expelled, I guess.
Final thoughts? Is this SSD recommended?
Would I recommend these SSDs? NO.
Honestly, avoid any ORICO SSDs for now. I honestly don’t know what the SATA to Flash Memory controller is in there (maybe a cheap Realtek?) but I am concerned about the quality of the drive.
Don’t risk a few bucks price difference, go with a brand that’s trusted and good quality.
Don’t forget the backup!
That’s all I ask. Make your life and the computer repair technician’s life easier with one weird trick! Back up your data.
Use something like an external drive. Cloud storage works, but keep a backup locally too. I’ll explain why in a later post.
Thanks for reading!
– Coburn