Today we are taking a look at the Inland Premium 1TB SSD. Inland is a smaller brand that is carried in-store at Microcenter, which is where I personally have encountered them. This particular review unit came from “the Amazon.” The Inland Premium 1TB is based on the Phison PS5012-E12S controller and comes equipped with Toshiba BiCS4 TLC NAND, and carries a value price tag.
Inland Premium 1TB NVMe SSD
The Inland Premium 1TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
Beneath the product label is the Phison PS5012-E12S-32 controller, four NAND packages, and a DRAM cache. The E12S-32 controller is an 8-channel controller capable of handling either TLC or QLC, and on this drive, it is connected to Toshiba 96-layer TLC NAND. Take note that the product label does include a link to Microcenter’s website, which certainly reinforces the idea that this is Microcenter’s house brand.
The back of this single-sided drive contains nothing but unused pads. This drive is also available in a 2TB capacity, and presumably, all these pads would be occupied by additional NAND and DDR3 on the larger model drive.
Inland Premium SSD Specs
The Inland Premium line of SSDs is available from 256GB to 2TB. Normally at this point, I would include a picture of the product spec sheet from the website, but that is a bit difficult in this case. As you saw the drive label contains a link to Microcenter; while this is certainly one place you can buy these drives, the website makes no ownership claim to the brand nor product datasheets for the line of drives. Additionally on the packaging is the link to the website for IPSG Products. IPSG stands for the International Products Sourcing Group and appears to be the company that actually orders these drives and imports them into the USA from their OEMs overseas. Its website is hilariously dated:
Aside from the throwback style (and content) of the website, no mention of the Inland SSDs appears on the site. So instead, for specs, we simply have to rely upon the packaging itself, which thankfully includes all of the things most buyers will want to know.
Our 1TB drive is rated at 3100 MB/s read and 2800 MB/s sequential write, which is very respectable for a PCIe 3.0 SSD. In addition, the 1600 TB endurance rating is excellent; many 1TB drives like the WD Blue SN550 1TB offer endurance ratings much closer to 600 TB.
The only area the Inland Premium 1TB falls short compared to ‘name brand’ competitors is in the length of the warranty, which is only 3 years. Most other mainstream drives now offer 5-year warranties, so the Inland drive is behind the curve a bit here. In addition, you can see that the warranty is served by IPSG Products (the company with the retro 1995 era website) and not Microcenter, which is just something to take note of.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3. Additionally, I took just a moment to chuckle at the model name of the drive “PCIe SSD 1024.2 GB” which just helps hammer home the “generic brand” feeling of the drive. Normally, this will have the drive name instead of a generic label.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Inland Premium 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
If it proves reliable, then it will get the nod over Samsungs in my builds! Excellent pricing!
I really appreciate the sustained write performance metric. Too many reviews don’t even saturate the cache.
From having dealt with microcenter on inland (and confirmed by employee helping) all inland products warranties are handled instore if actually purchased there and not a reseller
Thanks Larry. One of the interesting aspects is that we purchased this drive on Amazon.
Post cache writes are important. Thank-you for measuring it.
I’d love to know how consistent the hardware underneath the sticker is. If all the drives with “inland Premium 1TB NVMe SSD” on the package perform like this one it’s a killer deal(with the possible exception of thermally constrained laptop/USFF scenarios, it looks like it’s a little toasty for that; but nothing that would cause trouble in a higher airflow environment.)
If the same sticker goes on 5 different drives from whatever ODM was cheapest to rebadge that day and there’s no way of knowing which one you are getting that’s less exciting.
Surprise flash/controller/firmware swaps can (and have) happened even with considerably more expensive hardware from better known brands(some of which are shamefully unwilling to be nailed down on anything aside from capacity and a couple of unverifiably vague performance numbers); so I’m not just suspicious of inland because it’s a store brand (I’ve generally gotten solid results from them in the past); but if there is enough variation that I can’t just walk into Microcenter and grab a handful of these without potentially getting some drives that vary considerably that is a bit of a downer.
Awesome decision to include a non-mainstream brand! Thank You!
Every time one of these article/reviews of the NVMEs comes out, I keep on praying you retro-actively add some of the early drives to the Sustained Write Performance chart.
If I could choose one, PLEASE ADD the SK HYNIX P31 to the post-cache chart! pretty please!
Microcenter (IIRC) owns in part or all of the label Inland and sells via Amazon. I have a 2GB and 2 1GB versions of this drive, they punch above their weight class for the price.
@fuzzyfuzzyfungus
My experience is of course anecdotal, but fwiw, I have purchases the 2TB model (early 2019 iirc), the 256GB model, and the 512GB model (both pre-pandemic 2020). They are all Phison e12 with Toshiba BiCS (with DRAM caches). Considering this review notes the same, I would say they have been pretty consistent for at least several years. That is of course not necessarily indicitive of the future though…
Also anecdotally, I have experienced no issues with any of them to date.
Random note though, Do not mix up the Inland Premium and Inland Pro/Professional. The pro line is dram-less and not very good. The “Premium” branded model is the good one!
A MicroCenter employee once told me they choose Inland Premium NVMe SSDs for all of their display models because they’ve had the greatest balance of reliability/price among their NVMe choices.
I use dozens of Inland’s in the field for our appliances and they are rock solid stable, fast and I have not had a single one fail. I am still amazed how good these are for the price.
What is the difference between the Platinum and the Premium version? I can’t find the 1TB Premium SATA sticks anywhere.
Thanks
Will, please recheck your facts. As of this writing 3/8/22, Microcenter warrantee it’s Inland SSD’s for six years. Also, the IPSG Products web site is owned and copywrite by Micro Center so I would think any warrantee issues would be handled by Micro Center. Personally, I have two ITB Micro Center dives one in a desk top and one in an external enclosure and both have performed flawlessly for over two years. I will have no compunction buying another.