Biwin M350 2TB SSD Review: A Better Budget Alternative?

Biwin M350 2TB SSD Review: A Better Budget Alternative?

Biwin does give the drive a five-year warranty, which is nice, and 400TBW per TB capacity. This is perfectly in line with a drive using QLC flash at around two-thirds of what you get with TLC drives. This is plenty of writes for most people.

Biwin has two applications available for download for this drive. The first is Biwin Intelligence which is the company’s all-in-one SSD toolboxes. Such applications are used to receive basic information about your system and drives, help with firmware updates and with other features like secure erase and data backup, provide diagnostic data, and more.

The other program is the Biwin Data Recovery Tool which appears to be newer. Data recovery for SSDs – or memory cards, for that matter – is quite difficult if data is erased. Modern drives will quickly reclaim space for future writes if given the chance. Does this mean the tool is useless? No, as it is possible to recover data if you’re quick and there are situations where you might need it. However, we recommend having backups at all times.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) The Biwin M350 is a single-sided drive at all capacities. This makes it an easier choice for laptops and other devices that prefer or may need a thinner drive. The drive is rated for 3.3V / 2.0A, or 6.6 watts, but we know a drive at this performance level with this hardware is not going to pull anywhere near that. In fact, this one should be an excellent choice for mobile devices, which include laptops. That’s one advantage of under-gunning the hardware – this controller and flash can hit higher numbers, for sure – but not the only one.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) So let’s look at the hardware. Silicon Motion’s SM2268XT2 is a very capable four-channel, DRAM-less controller, able to match anything else on the market in this class. This includes the Phison E27T and super-popular Maxio MAP1602. It can hit up to 7,400 MB/s for sequential reads and up to 1,200K random read and write IOPS. So what gives with the specifications here? The M350 is rated more modestly, kind of like the Kingston NV3 , which shares the controller. Yes, the controller won’t be as fast with some flash memory, but both drives deliberately aim lower on the specifications. One reason is that this allows for hardware swapping later with less worry about meeting the rated speeds. Another reason is that you can run the drive at a slower speed to preserve endurance and potentially improve power efficiency.

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