SSD Manufacturers
Discussion
When it comes to internal SSDs....
Whose products do you like and use - and why?
Whose products do you dislike and avoid - and why?
The reason I ask is that I have five old computers that would benefit from an upgrade and am wondering what others like or dislike.
I like Samsung but don't really want to spend £££ per computer to upgrade them, so am wondering whether some of the mid-range manufacturers come with good recommendations.
Thanks!
Whose products do you like and use - and why?
Whose products do you dislike and avoid - and why?
The reason I ask is that I have five old computers that would benefit from an upgrade and am wondering what others like or dislike.
I like Samsung but don't really want to spend £££ per computer to upgrade them, so am wondering whether some of the mid-range manufacturers come with good recommendations.
Thanks!
Edited by RVB on Wednesday 4th August 10:46
hyphen said:
Price
Reputation for reliability.
Depending on usage, change order of these.
Thanks. Just as you were posting I added a clarification to my opening post.Reputation for reliability.
Depending on usage, change order of these.
If someone else is footing the bill, I'll have a Samsung or Western Digital. But as I'm paying and as they're light-use computers and as there's five of them, I'm hoping I might be able to find a reasonable compromise in the mid-range brands.
Edited by RVB on Wednesday 4th August 10:49
hyphen said:
Saw it, and changed mine 
If you are backing up critical stuff properly, then go cheaper.
Thanks.If you are backing up critical stuff properly, then go cheaper.
My main computer (an old Dell) has a Samsung Evo 860 SSD and for backup has a permanently connected Western Digitial external mechanical HDD, plus a Toshiba external mechanical HDD which is stored at the parents-in-law's house.
These old computers I'm planning to upgrade don't have critical things on them and don't need to be backed up very often, if at all.
However, I don't want to 'buy cheap, buy twice'.
I have Samsung Evo 980 Pro, WD Blue SN550, Sabrent Rocket Q (2 x 2TB QVO) and Crucial P1 + P2 (and X6/X8 externals)
As to why those brands, and specific models within them...simply due to their reputation, performance, and availability/price at the time I needed them (but usually buy a couple when there's a good offer on Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday / Cyber Monday).
I have a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro for the boot drive of my gaming PC, along with a 2TB Sabrent QVO for 'fast storage' and a 4TB IronWolf Pro for backups and 'slow storage'.
I have a 1TB WD Blue SN550 in my NUC media centre as it doesn't need a super-fast SSD in there.
I've had no failures of the Samsung or WD drives, and have had a 50% failure rate on the Sabrent, and 20% failure rate on the Crucial.
In all failures, the SSD has failed very quickly after install (during the first attempt to copy stuff from a full, smaller SSD, to the empty, new SSD) and nothing could be done to get them working as they simply became invisible to the system.
Also, you mention they're 'old' computers, so make sure you know what internal interface there is for SSDs, as there's no point buying a 6000mbps PCIe 4.0 m.2 SSD if your system only supports SATA1/2/3 1000mbps max!
As to why those brands, and specific models within them...simply due to their reputation, performance, and availability/price at the time I needed them (but usually buy a couple when there's a good offer on Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday / Cyber Monday).
I have a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro for the boot drive of my gaming PC, along with a 2TB Sabrent QVO for 'fast storage' and a 4TB IronWolf Pro for backups and 'slow storage'.
I have a 1TB WD Blue SN550 in my NUC media centre as it doesn't need a super-fast SSD in there.
I've had no failures of the Samsung or WD drives, and have had a 50% failure rate on the Sabrent, and 20% failure rate on the Crucial.
In all failures, the SSD has failed very quickly after install (during the first attempt to copy stuff from a full, smaller SSD, to the empty, new SSD) and nothing could be done to get them working as they simply became invisible to the system.
Also, you mention they're 'old' computers, so make sure you know what internal interface there is for SSDs, as there's no point buying a 6000mbps PCIe 4.0 m.2 SSD if your system only supports SATA1/2/3 1000mbps max!
Edited by mmm-five on Wednesday 4th August 12:37
RVB said:
These old computers I'm planning to upgrade don't have critical things on them and don't need to be backed up very often, if at all.
However, I don't want to 'buy cheap, buy twice'.
I buy the cheapest brand I have heard of and have ended up with a Kingston and a Gigabyte drive. Both have been running for over 18 months and have been excellent, I would 100% recommend both and the performance increase for older laptops is incredible.However, I don't want to 'buy cheap, buy twice'.
I think I paid under £30 for 240GB.
mmm-five said:
I have Samsung Evo 980 Pro, WD Blue SN550, Sabrent Rocket Q (2 x 2TB QVO) and Crucial P1 + P2 (and X6/X8 externals)
As to why those brands, and specific models within them...simply due to their reputation, performance, and availability/price at the time I needed them (but usually buy a couple when there's a good offer on Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday / Cyber Monday).
I have a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro for the boot drive of my gaming PC, along with a 2TB Sabrent QVO for 'fast storage' and a 4TB IronWolf Pro for backups and 'slow storage'.
I have a 1TB WD Blue SN550 in my NUC media centre as it doesn't need a super-fast SSD in there.
I've had no failures of the Samsung or WD drives, and have had a 50% failure rate on the Sabrent, and 20% failure rate on the Crucial.
In all failures, the SSD has failed very quickly after install (during the first attempt to copy stuff from a full, smaller SSD, to the empty, new SSD) and nothing could be done to get them working as they simply became invisible to the system.
Also, you mention they're 'old' computers, so make sure you know what internal interface there is for SSDs, as there's no point buying a 6000mbps PCIe 4.0 m.2 SSD if your system only supports SATA1/2/3 1000mbps max!
Thanks.As to why those brands, and specific models within them...simply due to their reputation, performance, and availability/price at the time I needed them (but usually buy a couple when there's a good offer on Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday / Cyber Monday).
I have a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro for the boot drive of my gaming PC, along with a 2TB Sabrent QVO for 'fast storage' and a 4TB IronWolf Pro for backups and 'slow storage'.
I have a 1TB WD Blue SN550 in my NUC media centre as it doesn't need a super-fast SSD in there.
I've had no failures of the Samsung or WD drives, and have had a 50% failure rate on the Sabrent, and 20% failure rate on the Crucial.
In all failures, the SSD has failed very quickly after install (during the first attempt to copy stuff from a full, smaller SSD, to the empty, new SSD) and nothing could be done to get them working as they simply became invisible to the system.
Also, you mention they're 'old' computers, so make sure you know what internal interface there is for SSDs, as there's no point buying a 6000mbps PCIe 4.0 m.2 SSD if your system only supports SATA1/2/3 1000mbps max!
Interesting about the 'if they failed, they generally failed very quickly'.
The old computers are SATA.
My desk has a dead Crucial MX 500 on it after about 6 months of light desktop use. I've got a dozen or so others that have been fine.
I've also got a Samsung 840 evo that has bad sectors all over the place after several years heavy desktop use.
Unless your time is free, I'd suggest looking on Amazon for the cheapest drive in the size you want that has a decent number of positive reviews, and don't spend any more time analysing.
I've also got a Samsung 840 evo that has bad sectors all over the place after several years heavy desktop use.
Unless your time is free, I'd suggest looking on Amazon for the cheapest drive in the size you want that has a decent number of positive reviews, and don't spend any more time analysing.
I think that unreliable SSDs largely died out with the unlamented Sandforce 2000-series controllers, which I had in around 4 or 5 bricked SATA SSDs from OCZ and Kingston. The only I have had fail recently have been SK Hynix SATA (50% failure rate) and an early Samsung NVMe drive. I run a large number of NVMe drives from Samsung, WD and Sabrent which are solid, and I stick to Samsung for SATA.
I think most makes should be good now for desktop or laptop use, but do keep backups and have a recovery strategy especially for system disks
I think most makes should be good now for desktop or laptop use, but do keep backups and have a recovery strategy especially for system disks
I would think you should be safe with most brands, I've use Samsung and Crucial for SATA drvies, and NVME's are Corsair, all brands with good reputations. I did have a cheap Samsung fail within a week many years ago, but I think that was when they were rebranding other drives or buying in controllers.
The last SSD I bought was about a year ago, a SATA boot drive for our little HTPC, 120GB by Intenso sold by Amazon, £15.80 delivered! It's been perfect so far, and with the family home with lockdown the PC has been running non stop, with Disney+, netflix, etc.
The last SSD I bought was about a year ago, a SATA boot drive for our little HTPC, 120GB by Intenso sold by Amazon, £15.80 delivered! It's been perfect so far, and with the family home with lockdown the PC has been running non stop, with Disney+, netflix, etc.
Edited by Mr_Yogi on Thursday 5th August 01:06
xeny said:
Unless your time is free, I'd suggest looking on Amazon for the cheapest drive in the size you want that has a decent number of positive reviews, and don't spend any more time analysing.
Found 120GB PNY for £16 so bought a couple which just arrived. One is in the process of cloning at the moment and the computer labels it 'Micron Tech' so I suppose it has Micron/Crucial flash inside the PNY casing.For a while at my previous job, I had to test SSDs to destruction (and at the time, each SSD was around £1,000 for 64G).
My company didn't make the SSDs, but we did embed them in our systems and found they were failing after a short period of time. Since they were installed in lights-out locations, running 24x7 producing KPIs for our customers, it cost us around £800 to send someone out to replace them (and we had around 5,000 around the world), plus the cost of the SSD. It was getting pricey after the first 10 or so...
Of course, the manufacturer didn't believe us - after all, they'd marketed their SSDs as being "industrial strength".
After about 6 months, I went to the manufacturer and said there were two possibilities I could think of that meant it was basically a hardware (not bringing up the erase voltage to a certain threshold) or a firmware bug (not waiting long enough for the firmware to erase properly).
Turned out it was the second, so they sent us a new firmware update - which we deployed to all of the machines (I also worked out how to identify how soon they were going to fail, so we could prioritise them). Luckily not all 5,000 needed replacing (some had an earlier firmware which didn't have the problem), but it was still around 400 that needed replacement.
A year later, they started failing again. And by analysing the SMART data (which we were now recording), I identified the problem as the firmware they'd given us didn't check that the sectors were bad before trying to write to them.
They gave us new firmware, but we didn't trust it and I wrote a program that just blatted the SSD enough to get to the point where it was able to identify the bad sectors before any important data was added to it.
They dropped the "Industrial strength" from their website
I won't say who they were, but it did teach me a lot about what to look for - and I will say that the only SSDs I would trust in important situations are Samsung and Crucial. I had a Transcend MSATA that failed very quickly, but I'm not sure where I got that from - I just found it in my collection one day!
My company didn't make the SSDs, but we did embed them in our systems and found they were failing after a short period of time. Since they were installed in lights-out locations, running 24x7 producing KPIs for our customers, it cost us around £800 to send someone out to replace them (and we had around 5,000 around the world), plus the cost of the SSD. It was getting pricey after the first 10 or so...
Of course, the manufacturer didn't believe us - after all, they'd marketed their SSDs as being "industrial strength".
After about 6 months, I went to the manufacturer and said there were two possibilities I could think of that meant it was basically a hardware (not bringing up the erase voltage to a certain threshold) or a firmware bug (not waiting long enough for the firmware to erase properly).
Turned out it was the second, so they sent us a new firmware update - which we deployed to all of the machines (I also worked out how to identify how soon they were going to fail, so we could prioritise them). Luckily not all 5,000 needed replacing (some had an earlier firmware which didn't have the problem), but it was still around 400 that needed replacement.
A year later, they started failing again. And by analysing the SMART data (which we were now recording), I identified the problem as the firmware they'd given us didn't check that the sectors were bad before trying to write to them.
They gave us new firmware, but we didn't trust it and I wrote a program that just blatted the SSD enough to get to the point where it was able to identify the bad sectors before any important data was added to it.
They dropped the "Industrial strength" from their website
I won't say who they were, but it did teach me a lot about what to look for - and I will say that the only SSDs I would trust in important situations are Samsung and Crucial. I had a Transcend MSATA that failed very quickly, but I'm not sure where I got that from - I just found it in my collection one day!
tribbles said:
For a while at my previous job, I had to test SSDs to destruction (and at the time, each SSD was around £1,000 for 64G).
My company didn't make the SSDs, but we did embed them in our systems and found they were failing after a short period of time. Since they were installed in lights-out locations, running 24x7 producing KPIs for our customers, it cost us around £800 to send someone out to replace them (and we had around 5,000 around the world), plus the cost of the SSD. It was getting pricey after the first 10 or so...
Of course, the manufacturer didn't believe us - after all, they'd marketed their SSDs as being "industrial strength".
After about 6 months, I went to the manufacturer and said there were two possibilities I could think of that meant it was basically a hardware (not bringing up the erase voltage to a certain threshold) or a firmware bug (not waiting long enough for the firmware to erase properly).
Turned out it was the second, so they sent us a new firmware update - which we deployed to all of the machines (I also worked out how to identify how soon they were going to fail, so we could prioritise them). Luckily not all 5,000 needed replacing (some had an earlier firmware which didn't have the problem), but it was still around 400 that needed replacement.
A year later, they started failing again. And by analysing the SMART data (which we were now recording), I identified the problem as the firmware they'd given us didn't check that the sectors were bad before trying to write to them.
They gave us new firmware, but we didn't trust it and I wrote a program that just blatted the SSD enough to get to the point where it was able to identify the bad sectors before any important data was added to it.
They dropped the "Industrial strength" from their website
I won't say who they were, but it did teach me a lot about what to look for - and I will say that the only SSDs I would trust in important situations are Samsung and Crucial. I had a Transcend MSATA that failed very quickly, but I'm not sure where I got that from - I just found it in my collection one day!
An interesting post - thank you. My company didn't make the SSDs, but we did embed them in our systems and found they were failing after a short period of time. Since they were installed in lights-out locations, running 24x7 producing KPIs for our customers, it cost us around £800 to send someone out to replace them (and we had around 5,000 around the world), plus the cost of the SSD. It was getting pricey after the first 10 or so...
Of course, the manufacturer didn't believe us - after all, they'd marketed their SSDs as being "industrial strength".
After about 6 months, I went to the manufacturer and said there were two possibilities I could think of that meant it was basically a hardware (not bringing up the erase voltage to a certain threshold) or a firmware bug (not waiting long enough for the firmware to erase properly).
Turned out it was the second, so they sent us a new firmware update - which we deployed to all of the machines (I also worked out how to identify how soon they were going to fail, so we could prioritise them). Luckily not all 5,000 needed replacing (some had an earlier firmware which didn't have the problem), but it was still around 400 that needed replacement.
A year later, they started failing again. And by analysing the SMART data (which we were now recording), I identified the problem as the firmware they'd given us didn't check that the sectors were bad before trying to write to them.
They gave us new firmware, but we didn't trust it and I wrote a program that just blatted the SSD enough to get to the point where it was able to identify the bad sectors before any important data was added to it.
They dropped the "Industrial strength" from their website
I won't say who they were, but it did teach me a lot about what to look for - and I will say that the only SSDs I would trust in important situations are Samsung and Crucial. I had a Transcend MSATA that failed very quickly, but I'm not sure where I got that from - I just found it in my collection one day!
I use a Samsung Evo 860 in my main computer because I have a higher level of confidence in Samsung's products (I have used a lot of micro sd cards in the past and Samsung seem to be more suitable for a wide range of uses, more reliable, and longer lived).
However, for less important computers I don't like paying Samsung prices.
And although I've worn out numerous micro sd cards, that doesn't necessarily translate to how that manufacturer's SSDs will perform and last due, as you say, to such things as firmware, controllers, construction and the quality of flash memory used.
Klippie said:
Very usefull thread...I've just bought a MSI GE66 Raider which comes with a M.2 512GB SSD I'am planning to install a 1TB drive along side it for storage...any suggestions would be welcome.
Also what brand of memory is good for durability vs speed.
If something was of high importance, I would choose Samsung because their products seem more consistent and longer-lived (*).Also what brand of memory is good for durability vs speed.
With the old spinning hard drives, I always felt Western Digital built the most consistent and long-lived.
But as in my opening post, I can't justify spending on Samsung SSDs for old, light-use computers which don't have large amounts of irreplaceable data
(*)
I'm sometimes involved in dashcam beta testing, where micro sd flash memory cards are commonly used to store video.
The relentless hours of write/delete/overwrite action of a dashcam on a fragmented card is punishing to those micro sds.
As a tester, I try different micro sds for compatibility and suitability with dashcam products. I have dozens of micro sds laying around from almost every big manufacturer.
Samsung cards more than paid for their extra cost with long lifespans and reliable, consistent performance, even when badly fragmented, in every dashcam I ever tested (including competitor cams).
Toshiba (now Kioxia?) were my favourite mid-priced brand. With their recent rebranding - possibly budget-oriented - I'm not sure what they represent nowadays.
All Samsung. If you keep an eye on amazon and amazon warehouse it really isn't that expensive to get Samsung.
I have 970, 970 Evo, 980. 1tb, 500gb, 256gb etc. All four machines run Samsung NVME and when you are only talking an extra tenner or something like that it was hard to not go with what I know. Three out of four machines are mining away and the hassle free speed of samsung nvme just works.
RW
I have 970, 970 Evo, 980. 1tb, 500gb, 256gb etc. All four machines run Samsung NVME and when you are only talking an extra tenner or something like that it was hard to not go with what I know. Three out of four machines are mining away and the hassle free speed of samsung nvme just works.
RW
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