ASolid Creates SSD Confusion By Using Similar Model Number To Competitors

We're not fans of companies borrowing part numbers from their competitors. It creates confusion in the market, and even worse, it just shows a lack of innovation when a company can't even piece together a unique product number.

For the last two years, Silicon Motion, Inc. has shipped the SM2258 4-channel SATA SSD controller. In that time we've come to call this part the "2258". It's a simple, and precise, abbreviation that everyone reading a SSD review knows and understands. It's a popular controller, and now there are two 2258 controllers.

ASolid jumped into the market with the AS2258 2-channel SATA controller that, on paper, shows similar specifications, features, and component support as its SMI counterpart.

The AS2258 ships in products destined mainly for mainland China, where low-cost SSDs are big sellers. To reach insanely low prices some off-brands "reclaim" flash from broken devices like SSDs that have been returned for replacement. That sounds bad on its own, but those are a product tier higher than counterfeit SSDs, which ship in the millions.

We're not claiming ASolid or its partners have done anything that nefarious, they just took the 2258 name and made it their own. It's really too bad the company chose to go down this road. The performance of the AS2258 is pretty good for a low-cost SSD. The sequential performance looks good. We did notice a lack of high random read performance with the AS2258, however, which is what makes the SM2258 such a good controller for consumer workloads.