MyDigitalSSD BP4 2.5" & mSATA (240GB) Review

Final Words

There's one thing that tells more about the BP4 than anything else: price. There's no SSD that can really challenge it in price if we look at all available capacities and I even tried to gather budget SSDs in the table below. Especially the 240GB BP4 at $160 is a brilliant deal as 240GB/256GB SSDs are commonly in the $200 range. Sure there are sales every now and then and I've seen the 250GB Samsung 840 hitting $150 but keep in mind that MyDigitalSSD's prices are not temporary—they are retail prices and are unlikely to change dramatically (at least not by going up).

Of course, you always have to trade off performance for price. The BP4 is not the fastest SSD we have tested and most of the other SATA 6Gbps SSDs are faster, but the BP4 is not terribly slow. Any SSD (well, almost) is still much faster than a traditional hard drive so simply having an SSD is far more important than the brand or performance of the SSD.

We have seen some pretty bad budget SSDs over the years, such as Crucial v4 and OCZ Agility 4, but the BP4 is miles ahead. Typically budget SSDs have one big Achilles' Heel (oftentimes write performance due to the use of lower quality NAND) but the BP4 has none. Random IO performance is average, IO consistency is good and power consumption is great. I literally can't find any weak points in the BP4. There are aspects that could be better, such as random read/write speeds, but after all we are dealing with a budget SSD and I don't think it's even reasonable to expect high-end SSD performance.

The only question is long-term reliability. When a relatively unknown player steps into the market, it always takes at least a generation or two before any sort of reliability can be determined. MyDigitalSSD is claiming that their reliability is on par with Intel but I would take manufacturers' words with a grain of salt. That said, I haven't seen enough MyDigitalSSD's drives around to draw any scientific conclusions of their reliability but on the other hand, I haven't had any issues with mine nor have I heard of anyone else having issues. Only time will tell how the reliability plays out but then again, we also need a sufficient sample size as reliability can't be determined unless people actually buy and use the product. While the unknown reliability is definitely a con, I don't think it should be taken too seriously. Any drive can fail so you should always have a backup regardless of what your primary drive is.

All in all, I have no reason not to recommend the BP4. For once the price/performance ratio is reasonable as most of the time budget SSDs fail due to the fact that the price isn't cheap enough to compensate for the lack of performance. I would still choose Samsung SSD 840 over the BP4 if the price is the same, mainly because the SSD 840 is slightly faster and its reliability is more proven, but I wouldn't consider the SSD 840 to be worth much more (maybe ~$10-20).

All MyDigitalSSD needs to do now is to get their name out in the public as I'm sure not many have heard of them before. Expanding their sales channel to more vendors would be a good start because in the end you will always be limited in visibility if you only rely on Amazon and your own online store (although I do see the the enticement of keeping the distribution channel as simple as possible and it definitely helps to keep the prices low). I'm sure MyDigitalSSD has considered many options and made their decisions based on what's best for the company, but there's no doubt that the BP4 could be a great vehicle for taking a bigger slice of the market.