VectoTech V-MAX 16TB SSD review: Game-changing SATA capacity

Price When Reviewed

1TB: $69 I 2TB: $179 I 4TB: $299 I 8TB: $799 I 16TB: $1,799

Best Prices Today: VectoTech V-MAX SATA III SSD

VectoTech’s V-MAX SATA SSD helps you to add as much as 16TB of storage capability per unit to your system with out struggling the poor reliability and dawdling efficiency related to an HDD’s spinning platters. And, sure, that’s 16TB in a single drive.

The upshot is that with most programs providing 4 to 8 SATA ports, stacking V-MAX drives can add as much as 128TB of quick (in comparison with HDDs) storage on your system. Alas, it ain’t gonna be low cost.

Read on to be taught extra, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparability.

Not NVMe?

Ah, the elephant within the room. We love the NVMe interface and its excellent efficiency, nevertheless it maxes out at 8TB per drive within the client house and sucks up PCIe sources in a rush. Many programs can’t help multiple or two NVMe SSDs.

But, those self same programs will typically have 4 to 8 SATA ports, that means you’ll be able to add much more SATA SSDs than NVMe varieties with out an add-in card such because the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5.

It was really SATA SSDs that modified the storage recreation, not NMVe. Prior to SATA SSDs, slothful HDD entry (search) instances and throughput negated a lot of the positive aspects CPUs had realized through the years.

Long story brief, you possible gained’t hate the efficiency of an SATA SSD, particularly should you mix a pair in RAID 0 or comparable for elevated throughput.

What are the V-MAX’s options?

Back to the product at hand: The VectoTech V-MAX is a SATA III (6Gbps) SSD within the widespread 2.5-inch kind issue. You can match it in any 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch bay with solely a slight quantity of jockeying and 4 screws. I exploit 2.5-inch SATA SSDs in my 3.5-inch bay NAS bins.

The V-MAX is a nice-looking product styled in black with the charcoal grey emblem and information labeled onto the back and front. It gained’t sully the view with an innards-on-full-display gaming rig. And you’ll be able to, in fact, match a heck of a whole lot of video games on 16TB.

And it’s actually the per-unit capability that makes this product particular. I’m solely conscious of 1 different greater-than-4TB SATA SSD in the marketplace. But it’s “only” 8TB and is priced considerably larger than the 8TB V-MAX (see the unhealthy information under).

The V-Max makes use of a Phison PS3112-S12 controller and 112-layer Kioxia TLC NAND. DRAM is supplied with 256MB per terabyte on the 1TB and 2TB fashions, and 1GB per terabyte on the 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB items.

VectoTech warranties the V-MAX for 3 years, and supplies 750TBW (terabytes that may be written) per terabyte of capability for the 1TB and 2TB fashions, 3420TBW for the 4TB, 3125TBW for the 8TB, and a pair of,812.5TBW for the 16TB. Why the nonlinear TBW rankings, I can’t let you know, however all are past the trade norm. In the three bigger capacities, method past the norm.

Consumers are extraordinarily unlikely to jot down greater than these rankings inside a three-year interval, so the years on this case may be the extra worrisome issue. Most inner SSDs are warrantied for 5 years.

More worrisome, sure, however I haven’t seen an inner SSD go stomach up in over a decade, in order that’s extra on the lesser finish of worrisome issues.

How a lot is the V-MAX?

The VectoTech V-MAX is offered in 1TB/$69, 2TB/$179, 4TB/$299, 8TB/$799, and 16TB/$1,799 capacities. Yes, that’s NVMe-like pricing, however large-capacity SSDs don’t develop on bushes.

Most distributors don’t make large-capacity client SSDs. The solely different one I’ve discovered that’s presently obtainable, the 8TB Micron 5210 Ion, is $1,100 — far more than the 8TB V-MAX, and it’s QLC, not TLC just like the V-MAX.

By method of comparability, two 16TB HDDs are solely round $500. Why two? Never belief knowledge solely to an HDD with out it being mirrored to a different one, or backed up in another method. I’ve had too many go stomach up, albeit not in fairly some time — high quality has improved fairly a bit through the years. If you don’t want SSD velocity, it can save you an entire lot of moolah going that route.

How quick is the V-MAX?

SATA III, being 6Gbps, maxes out at round 550MBps in sustained throughput — about twice that of a contemporary 3.5-inch HDD, however far slower than NVMe. However, search instances are one other story, with SSDs being 0.04 to 0.1 milliseconds whereas HDD search instances are tens of milliseconds. NVMe runs between 0.01 and 0.02 ms.

I retested two older SATA SSDs (Seagate’s IronWolf and Samsung’s 870 QVO) on our new testbed to check them to the V-MAX. Given the SATA efficiency ceiling, there’s not an entire lot of distinction however you’ll positively need to keep away from the Samsung 870 QVO (should you may even discover it) for giant writes.

The V-MAX was the perfect of this small lot when it got here to sustained throughput as measured by CrystalDiskMark 8.

The similar cope with CrystalDiskMark 8’s 4K exams — the V-MAX dominated. Albeit, by small margins.

Our real-world 48GB transfers have been a blended bag for the V-MAX, with it quickest at some and never a lot in others. Overall, there wasn’t an entire lot of distinction to select from.

This chart is wonky because the 870 QVO is an older QLC NAND drive that drops to under 100MBps when it runs out of secondary cache, which sadly, was effectively earlier than 450GB was written. As you’ll be able to see, the extra trendy elements within the V-MAX made a distinction in that regard.

So sure, it’s sooner than a tough drive by far, and sooner than the opposite (far older) SATA competitors. Seek instances, as mentioned, are fairly good within the broad scheme of issues. In one other universe from HDDs, and, subjectively, within the ballpark with NVMe.

Should you purchase the V-MAX SATA SSD?

If capability is your most urgent difficulty, and also you need one thing sooner and extra strong than a tough drive in a single package deal, then sure — the 16TB V-MAC might be your dream product. It’s additionally just about the one recreation on the town for maxing out the SSD storage of a client PC with out a number of add-in playing cards.

That mentioned, the 16TB V-MX will not be for financially faint of coronary heart, I imply pockets. I’d have a tough time myself rationalizing it over HDDs. But I’m not engaged on huge video or different giant data-set tasks with efficiency considerations.

In different phrases, you’re by yourself by means of figuring out financial suitability.

How we take a look at

Drive exams presently make the most of Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence whole).

Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs concerned in testing are mounted in a Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card siting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 artificial benchmarks (to maintain article size down, we solely report one) to search out the storage system’s potential efficiency, then a sequence of 48GB and 450GB transfers exams utilizing Windows Explorer drag and drop to indicate what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far sooner FastCopy run as administrator to indicate what’s attainable.

A 20GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used because the second drive in our switch exams. Formerly the 48GB exams have been accomplished with a RAM disk serving that goal.

Each take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency might lower resulting from much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements. This difficulty has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much sooner, late-generation NAND.

Note that our testing MO evolves and these outcomes might not match these from earlier articles. Only comparisons contained in the article are 100% legitimate as these outcomes are gathered utilizing the present {hardware} and MO.