Hi All,


My girlfriend has a generic brand ebike, a bit above entry level, but the disk brakes are single piston mechanical. This e-bike is used to commute daily and descending about 400m of steep hill, she used a set of pads in about 1300km (I am sure the stock pads were crappy).

Since I am doing the maintenance on the bike , I would like to upgrade calipers with something more reliable and with less maintenance but the budget is around 50 euros. After much reading, I am debating between the Tektro MD-C550 or the Shimano MT200. I know there are much better brakes available but are more expensive, I figured this will already be a great improvement.

I believe the rotors should be 160. I have considered the chinese hybrid calipers but they don't seem reliable.


What do you guys suggest between these two options? Are the Shimano reliable, how often do they need bleeding? Or if there are other alternatives to the Tektro for dual piston mechanical I am all ears. I am happy to buy used parts as well.


Any advice is highly appreciated.

I use the Zoom HB100B cable pull hydraulic calipers on several of my bikes. Really inexpensive, good brake feel, and unreliable. First one started leaking after a few hundred miles. Correlates with past amazon reviews. I doubt the makers have improved the design, I replaced it with another one, but I only use them on one wheel. I feel safe because I can tell when something feels off on my bikes, like tire pressure, motor assist or braking power. I'll fix it immediately.

Meanwhile, I have installed MT200's on two bikes. No problems other than having to attach brake switches on the levers. The electric MT200's avoid this, but cost more.

As above, I have MT 200's on two MTB's (one analog and one digital) and they have been durable and reliable.

If you stick with mechanical brakes, upgrading the levers might make even more of a difference than upgrading the calipers. I've got a set of TRP Spykes (Basically a fancier version of the Tektro MD-C550) and even with compressionless housing, the brakes feel like mushy garbage because I'm still using the cheap ultra-flexy levers that came with the ebike kit. I'd figure out a set of brake sensors that are compatible with your ebike, then attach them to a set of Tektro RS360A. For calipers, those Tektros should be fine, Avid BB7 are worth considering as well. Compressionless housing will help stiffen up any mechanical brake.

If the sensors in the MT200 ebike levers are compatible with your bike, then they seem like an obvious choice. If they aren't, you might be able to splice the connectors from the old levers onto them if you have some basic soldering experience, though I can't guarantee that will work.

Hydraulic brakes often need maintenance less often than mechanical brakes, but bleeding a set of brakes generally takes longer than adjusting a set of mechanical brakes, and you need a bleed kit.

How quickly the pads wear out depends on the pad material, as well as the conditions the bike is being ridden in. Cheap brakes usually come with organic pads, swapping to semi-metallic will get more life out of the pads, but also make the brakes more noisy.

Thanks guys for the great feedback!

You are totally right about the levers, they are a huge piece of junk! They have so much play in all directions and don't even hold the brake cable stop in place. After all your advice I decided I will get a pair of MT200 and call it a day.

I don't see any sensor or cable in my ebike levers, only the brake cable, what kind of sensors are in the MT200? This ebike has a center motor but it's not that advanced, there's no torque adjustment for example. I think it should be a plug and play with MT200, the holes distance is around 70mm so they should fit fine. One last question I have is about the rotors. Should I leave the stock rotors or get one of the rotors as a package such as the HS1 or RT56 RT54 RT30?

thanks again!

Generally, ebikes should come with a sensor in each lever that cuts off power to the motor when the lever is squeezed. It's kind of an important safety feature, and seems sketchy that your bike doesn't have one. If the electrical wiring harness on the bike has a few spare connectors floating around, then two of them might be for attaching brake sensors. If there isn't anything extra, then perhaps they cheaped out too much on it, and your best bet is to just hope that whatever brakes you install will be strong enough to stop the bike if a malfunction happens and the motor is stuck powering the bike when you don't want it to. If that is the case and the bike has both a throttle and a torque sensor/cadence sensor to activate the motor when pedaling the bike, it might be safest to remove the throttle from the bike to reduce the chance of an accident.

If the current rotors haven't seen a lot of use, you could reuse them with the new brakes, just make sure to clean them with isopropyl and a perfectly clean rag beforehand. On the other hand, cheap rotors are typically quite flexy and easier to knock out of true, so getting nicer rotors can help reduce how often you need to true them.

I haven't actually seen the version of the MT-200 that has brake sensors in person, and can't find that much info online, so I don't know what sort of compatibility they would have with your bike. With the way Shimano typically operates, I would expect them to do some sort of stupid thing to make their levers not directly compatible with ebikes that don't have a Shimano STEPs motor, but the pictures I see show a connector that looks very similar to the connector on my ebike kit. So who knows?

Brake sensors aside, most cheap generic ebikes use post mount calipers, if yours does, the MT200 should fit fine. If your bike uses a different style of brake mount, then you might need adapters to make them fit.

Thanks for the explanation, I am uploading some pictures. I don't think the break has any sensors, but I am sure there's a torque or cadence sensor. Are these post mount calipers or will I need an adapter?

Those are post mount calipers. The rear has an adapter to fit the IS mount on the frame.

Would that be specific to throttle ebikes? My boost-type ebike has no communications between brakes and the drive system.

I think so, as I have never seen on pedal-assisted bikes.

In any case, I have ordered the MT200, the only thing I realized later is that my rear cable goes inside the frame, so I guess I will have to either attach it outside or re-bleed the lines as I will have to detach the level to pass the cable through the frame.

You will more than likely need to re-bleed. It is rare a brake is ready to go correctly sized out of the box and in some cases it does need a bleed anyway plus doing it right the first time will be well worth it. Getting over excited and not addressing these simple things will lead to headaches down the road.

Save your money until you can afford good disk brake calipers...be they mechanical or hydraulic...also make sure to maintain the brake pads and have an extra set. Ebikes go through brake pads far faster than a bicycle...they are much heavier and require more braking to slow and stop thus wearing out the pads faster...better off with metallic pads though without maintenance they will get screechy but at least everyone hears you as you are braking.
I have a pair of TRP Spyre carbon mechanical disk calipers and for mech cals they work quite well but they are not inexpensive.