Overclocking is done using the central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU). However, YouTuber Gabriel Ferraz looked a little further and tried overclocking the SSD. This has only partially succeeded. The SSD died at the end of the process. Moreover, overclocking seems to have no meaning in practice.

Ferraz shows in a YouTube video that he managed to increase the maximum clock speed of a SATA SSD from a little-known brand RZX. He did not explain exactly how he does this. He warns that there are “safety reasons” not to overclock SSDs and says there’s a high chance the device won’t survive. This was the case with him as well.

The video shows Ferraz using a 2.5-inch SATA SSD for his project. It uses a SATA drive and not an NVMe drive, because the SSDs Ferraz had at its disposal were already at maximum capacity. Clock frequency. The RZX SSD has an SM2259XT2 controller from Silicon Motion and TLC Nand from Kioxia.

The console in question has one controller ARC-32 bitcore, which supports clock speeds of up to 550MHz. However, in the RZX SSD, the clock speed is reduced to 425MHz by default. Kioxia’s NAND memory can officially run at a maximum of 400MHz, but that’s been reduced to 193.75MHz in the RZX SSD. Ferraz had to put the SSD into safe mode by shorting two contact points on the PCB. He was then able to overclock the console and SSD flash memory using SMI’s MPtool, though he doesn’t explain exactly how he does it in the video.

Ferraz says the results are not very surprising. He was able to increase the maximum frequency of the controller to 500 MHz, an increase of about eighteen percent and slightly less than the maximum speed of 550 MHz that Silicon Motion advertises. The flash memory frequency has also been increased to Kioxia’s advertised 400MHz. However, sequential read speeds remained about the same, and random read speeds increased from 134 to 170 MB/s. Random write speeds actually dropped from 155 to 140 MB/s.

In practice, according to Ferraz, it doesn’t seem so bad. Across the various benchmarks, the number of points increased slightly, but not by much. Loading times for games and heavy Adobe Premiere projects also seemed to be virtually unimproved. At the end of the trip, the SSD also appears to be consuming a lot of power: an average of about 63 percent, according to Ferraz. The SSD also stops working; nand memory crashes. Ferraz did not provide any specific explanation for this.