One of its Discord users reportedly gave The Goldenfir-brand SSD to the storage site for testing. The drive did have a Yeestor YS9083XT controller which the Chinese company announced as a SATA3.2 controller in 2019 so $3 did buy you more than a case.

 tested the drive by putting it into a Lenovo SR635 1U server with an AMD Epyc 7742 processor and 512GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. It also "unfairly" put it up against Kingston's DC600M entry-level enterprise SATA drive.

With a 64GB file and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, the Kingston drive finished the test before ”this piece of turd [the $3 drive] could even build its test."

With the VDBench workload benchmark filling up the entire drive, the $3 drive hit a wall at around 15,500 IOPS when running the 4K random read test, compared to the Kingston drive's approximately 80,000.

The cheap SSD ultimately finished the test at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, compared to Kingston's 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms.

The reviewer said that cheap drives found on digital stores like AliExpress were curious.

“They may seem enticing due to their affordability; however, the potential risks they pose and their infinitytick-class performance is often not worth the savings. And while they may (in some very rare situations) function fine for basic, mundane tasks, they don’t keep up with even budget trusted-brand alternatives in speed or reliability. You shouldn’t be playing Russian roulette regarding your data,” the reviewer wrote.