What is the most trusted SSD?

Ady2009 · 11 Feb 2024 at 12:52

Thanks all for your feedback. I did also note that the warranty on a 500Gb Samsung SSD is only 300 TBW while it is 600 TBW for a 1TB so I swapped the two 500 Gb's for a 1TB Samsung EVO. Fitted it last night and the installation was fine with this drive. There are no reported errors in crystal disk info either. I know I probably fell unlucky with the bad Cruicial drive but I will stick with Samsung from now on.

As an interesting side note, I have always had a good experience with HDD's with the exception of a bad batch in about 2013 when the HDD factories were destroyed in Thailand and so they had to switch production - if anyone remembers that? I even have a Seagate laptop drive with close to 40k hours on it! I had to swap it out for another not because there was anything wrong with it but I felt like I was really pushing my luck. When I plug it back in now, it still reports zero problems though!

Eddie99 · 11 Feb 2024 at 14:50

Ady2009 said:
I will stick with Samsung from now on

Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!

Certain 870 EVO 4TB and 2TB drives are affected by early failures where they develop uncorrectable errors and some data just cannot be read from them anymore. This seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021. For example, i have three 870 EVO 4TB, only one is affected (so...

www.techpowerup.com

Troezar · 11 Feb 2024 at 15:15

May as well add in my own experience here, never had one go pop even an old Intel X25M is still working. I haven't bought a HDD for a good 10 years I would think.

Tetras · 11 Feb 2024 at 15:17

Ady2009 said:
I know I probably fell unlucky with the bad Crucial drive but I will stick with Samsung from now on.

As I said in my post, they're no different than Crucial and other brands, Samsung have had a lot of problems (firmware and flash), as Eddie99's post confirms (have owned a broken 870 Evo myself). I'd just buy the cheapest major brand and keep backups, there's no infallible brand/drive.

Ady2009 · 11 Feb 2024 at 16:15

Yes, I understand they all have their issues. In another PC I have a cheap Kingston that gets really bad reviews for regular failure but that thing has not given me any trouble since I bought it.

Quartz · 11 Feb 2024 at 16:19

Ady2009 said:
It was time to upgrade my PC and after doing lots of reading I opted for a 1TB Crucial MX500. I thought I had made a good choice but after just 5 mins it failed!

This is termed infant mortality and is a thing with all electronics. You just got unlucky.

srekal34 · 11 Feb 2024 at 17:19

Quartz said:
This is termed infant mortality and is a thing with all electronics. You just got unlucky.

Yeah had the same with WD SN850 - worked for like 5 mins

but it happens and is hardly a manufacturers fault.

Cyber-Mav · 16 Feb 2024 at 09:44

enterprise drives

Yrkoon · 17 Feb 2024 at 23:12

my pc is full of evos now and a samsung nvme, just removed my last mechanical drive on sunday and stuck it in a caddie just for storage use, a 4 tb evo replaced it and never had a ssd fail yet

dads new pc is full of crucial drives and all good so far all in all ssd's and nvme drives seem pretty reliable to me

robinbanks · 18 Feb 2024 at 07:19

I would say corsair f60, as after something like 12 years it's still going strong somehow although painfully small now

Joking aside I think nowadays it's a bit of a silicone lottery.

Grimley · 18 Feb 2024 at 16:11

5 years ago this forum was raving about Sabrent Rocket NVME SSD's. Needless to say I bought one 256GB & I've had no problems with it. Just checked it & SMART says 3.4TB written, rated up to 340TB so it will be a while yet before I wear it out.

Semple · 18 Feb 2024 at 16:47

srekal34 said:
2 wrong assumptions:
-SSDs are not risky, failure rate is much lower than HDD
-2x 500GB is TWICE the risk as 1 drive(unless you put them in raid 1, but then you will be left with 500gb total capacity)

Raising this point as the OP seems to have completely missed it.

Considering the costs of 1Tb SSDs these days you'd have been better off getting 2 and using the second as a backup drive (preferably not permanently connected).

mattyfez · 8 Mar 2024 at 19:32

What is the most trusted SSD? or any drive for that matter...

One that has crucial data backed up elsewhere, so if something crashes and burns, you're just looking at inconvienience of reinstalling stuff and maybe the cost of a new drive.

If you look at it that way, reliablity isn't really a major consideration as long as you are dilligent enough to buy reasonably decent drive(s) from an established manufacturer.

dave28 · 8 Mar 2024 at 19:59

high end samsung for me

BananaDunka · 13 Mar 2024 at 17:38

bimbleuk said:
Or possibly drives like the HP enterprise SSDs as they will have a much higher endurance rating.

Price premium of course.

Endurance ratings are mostly trivial as even basic drives have such high ratings that a user would have to be writing to them 24/7 for years before the drive reaches that failure threshold. As a reference point my old SATA INtel Skulltrail 730 series (480GB) had some 70TB written to it and several years later when I sold it, it was still with something like 83% health if I remember right. I think I even sold it to someone on member's market.

Any drive can fail randomly, faults are faults that can happen at any time, could be a power spike, could be some random bit flip thanks to cosmic rays (it's a real thing, look it up!), could just be its time due to that unit leaving the factory slightly askew and it takes some time for the fault to trigger a failure etc etc.

Eddie99 · 13 Mar 2024 at 18:54

mrk said:
Endurance ratings are mostly trivial as even basic drives have such high ratings that a user would have to be writing to them 24/7 for years before the drive reaches that failure threshold.

Not really, there's a massive difference between for example a budget 120GB Kingston A400 (40TB endurance) and a premium 4TB Samsung 870 EVO (2,400 TB endurance). I have a 4 year old SSD with 128 TB written to it which would be enough to kill 3 Kingston A400 drives.

BananaDunka · 13 Mar 2024 at 19:17

It is realistic, there's even a calculator that you can punch in numbers to see what I said aligns on paper:

DWPD, TBW, GB/day Calculator - WintelGuy.com

DWPD, TBW, PBW, GB/day calculator / converter

wintelguy.com

Going by the numbers alone, you will need to be writing just over 36GB a day for 3 years to reach its rated TBW for the 120GB drive with 3 years warranty. This is not realistic to reach given it's not the capacity or interface that anyone buying one would be reaching. The logical answer is that such a drive would be lasting at least double its warranty life quite easily for 99% of people.

So yes you would in fact be writing to such a drive for years and years daily and far beyond its warranty life in order to reach its TBW.

Disco_P · 13 Mar 2024 at 21:28

Eddie99 said:
Not really, there's a massive difference between for example a budget 120GB Kingston A400 (40TB endurance) and a premium 4TB Samsung 870 EVO (2,400 TB endurance). I have a 4 year old SSD with 128 TB written to it which would be enough to kill 3 Kingston A400 drives.

100GB a day? A definite edge case and not really relevant to the OP. To be fair, most of this discussion is somewhat irrelevant as a single drive can just die at any time. A good backup is all you need.

Also a drive doesn't die when it reaches its endurance rating. Some can go for well beyond that rating.

Tetras · 13 Mar 2024 at 23:06

The reason I care about endurance rating isn't 'cos I think it'll be a problem, since I'd guess 99% of drives don't die because the flash wore out, but because drives with bad endurance usually have bottom of the barrel everything, so I take it as an indication that the NV2, for example has a decent likelihood of being a much lower quality drive (on average) than a SN770 and e.g. I definitely don't want some dodgy QLC and low-end controller on a boot drive.

Is the failure rate of low-end drives higher than midrange/high-end drives? I don't know, anecdotally the failure reports aren't great (e.g. Kingston NV1, NV2, Crucial P3), but I'd also need to weigh that with these cheap drives selling by the millions and being put into all kinds of devices, including very hot laptops and being installed by numpties.

SpellowHouse · 15 Mar 2024 at 22:18

Tetras said:
The reason I care about endurance rating isn't 'cos I think it'll be a problem, since I'd guess 99% of drives don't die because the flash wore out, but because drives with bad endurance usually have bottom of the barrel everything, so I take it as an indication that the NV2, for example has a decent likelihood of being a much lower quality drive (on average) than a SN770 and e.g. I definitely don't want some dodgy QLC and low-end controller on a boot drive.

Is the failure rate of low-end drives higher than midrange/high-end drives? I don't know, anecdotally the failure reports aren't great (e.g. Kingston NV1, NV2, Crucial P3), but I'd also need to weigh that with these cheap drives selling by the millions and being put into all kinds of devices, including very hot laptops and being installed by numpties.

I don't know. Of that drives that I have had fail, I think only one the flash wore out. In most cases the supporting chips failed in some way or another. I think that the reliability of flash is such that there is just as much chance of any chip failing. Unless, of course, you beat the flash to death, which most people probably don't do.