VectoTech’s V-MAX SATA SSD lets you add up to 16TB of storage capacity per unit to your system without suffering the poor reliability and dawdling performance associated with an HDD’s spinning platters. And, yes, that’s 16TB in a single drive.
The upshot is that with most systems offering 4 to 8 SATA ports, stacking V-MAX drives can add up to 128TB of fast (compared to HDDs) storage for your system. Alas, it ain’t gonna be cheap.
Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparison.
Ah, the elephant in the room. We love the NVMe interface and its superb performance, but it maxes out at 8TB per drive in the consumer space and sucks up PCIe resources in a hurry. Many systems can’t support more than one or two NVMe SSDs.
But, those same systems will generally have 4 to 8 SATA ports, meaning you can add a lot more SATA SSDs than NVMe types without an add-in card such as the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5.
It was actually SATA SSDs that changed the storage game, not NMVe. Prior to SATA SSDs, slothful HDD access (seek) times and throughput negated much of the gains CPUs had realized over the years.
Long story short, you likely won’t hate the performance of an SATA SSD, especially if you combine a couple in RAID 0 or similar for increased throughput.
Back to the product at hand: The VectoTech V-MAX is a SATA III (6Gbps) SSD in the common 2.5-inch form factor. You can fit it in any 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch bay with only a slight amount of jockeying and four screws. I use 2.5-inch SATA SSDs in my 3.5-inch bay NAS boxes.
The V-MAX is a nice-looking product styled in black with the charcoal gray logo and info labeled onto the front and back. It won’t sully the view with an innards-on-full-display gaming rig. And you can, of course, fit a heck of a lot of games on 16TB.
And it is really the per-unit capacity that makes this product special. I’m only aware of one other greater-than-4TB SATA SSD on the market. But it’s “only” 8TB and is priced significantly higher than the 8TB V-MAX (see the bad news below).
The V-Max uses a Phison PS3112-S12 controller and 112-layer Kioxia TLC NAND. DRAM is provided with 256MB per terabyte on the 1TB and 2TB models, and 1GB per terabyte on the 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB units.
VectoTech warranties the V-MAX for three years, and provides 750TBW (terabytes that can be written) per terabyte of capacity for the 1TB and 2TB models, 3420TBW for the 4TB, 3125TBW for the 8TB, and 2,812.5TBW for the 16TB. Why the nonlinear TBW ratings, I can’t tell you, but all are beyond the industry norm. In the three larger capacities, way beyond the norm.
Consumers are extremely unlikely to write more than those ratings within a three-year period, so the years in this case might be the more worrisome factor. Most internal SSDs are warrantied for five years.
More worrisome, yes, but I haven’t seen an internal SSD go belly up in over a decade, so that’s more on the lesser end of worrisome things.
The VectoTech V-MAX is available in 1TB/$69, 2TB/$179, 4TB/$299, 8TB/$799, and 16TB/$1,799 capacities. Yes, that’s NVMe-like pricing, but large-capacity SSDs don’t grow on trees.
Most vendors don’t make large-capacity consumer SSDs. The only other one I’ve found that’s currently available, the 8TB Micron 5210 Ion, is $1,100 — way more than the 8TB V-MAX, and it’s QLC, not TLC like the V-MAX.
By way of comparison, two 16TB HDDs are only around $500. Why two? Never trust data solely to an HDD without it being mirrored to another one, or backed up in some other way. I’ve had too many go belly up, albeit not in quite a while — quality has improved quite a bit over the years. If you don’t need SSD speed, you can save a whole lot of moolah going that route.
SATA III, being 6Gbps, maxes out at around 550MBps in sustained throughput — about twice that of a modern 3.5-inch HDD, but far slower than NVMe. However, seek times are another story, with SSDs being 0.04 to 0.1 milliseconds while HDD seek times 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 compare them to the V-MAX. Given the SATA performance ceiling, there’s not a whole lot of difference but you’ll definitely want to avoid the Samsung 870 QVO (if you can even find it) for large writes.
The V-MAX was the best of this small lot when it came to sustained throughput as measured by CrystalDiskMark 8.
The same deal with CrystalDiskMark 8’s 4K tests — the V-MAX ruled. Albeit, by small margins.
Our real-world 48GB transfers were a mixed bag for the V-MAX, with it fastest at some and not so much in others. Overall, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference to choose from.
This chart is wonky as the 870 QVO is an older QLC NAND drive that drops to below 100MBps when it runs out of secondary cache, which unfortunately, was well before 450GB was written. As you can see, the more modern components in the V-MAX made a difference in that regard.
So yes, it’s faster than a hard drive by far, and faster than the other (far older) SATA competition. Seek times, as discussed, are quite good in the broad scheme of things. In another universe from HDDs, and, subjectively, in the ballpark with NVMe.
If capacity is your most pressing issue, and you want something faster and more robust than a hard drive in a single package, then yes — the 16TB V-MAC could be your dream product. It’s also pretty much the only game in town for maxing out the SSD storage of a consumer PC without multiple add-in cards.
That said, the 16TB V-MX is not for financially faint of heart, I mean wallet. I’d have a hard time myself rationalizing it over HDDs. But I’m not working on massive video or other large data-set projects with performance concerns.
In other words, you’re on your own by way of determining monetary suitability.
Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running 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 memory total).
Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved 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 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we only report one) to find the storage device’s potential performance, then a series of 48GB and 450GB transfers tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible.
A 20GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose.
Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND.
Note that our testing MO evolves and these results may not match those from previous articles. Only comparisons inside the article are 100% valid as those results are gathered using the current hardware and MO.
Author: Jon Jacobi
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
