Does anyone make good SSDs any more?

[wraper]

Don't forget that even old machines can benefit from M.2/NVMe if they have an available PCIe slot (x4, not sure that x1 bw would be enough). Obviously not talking about laptops here, but most all desktops except the tiny PCs would have expansion slots. You can buy a PCIe card with single or dual (maybe more) M.2 slots on them. I did so for an older desktop that had only one onboard M.2 when I wanted to add another.

They won't be able to start booting from that drive though on machines that do not have NVMe support in BIOS. With PCI-E 1.x you need x4, and x2 for 2.x for it to be better than SATA.

[NiHaoMike]

They won't be able to start booting from that drive though on machines that do not have NVMe support in BIOS.

Get one of your old USB drives and use it for the /boot partition and bootloader, if the system has no other storage device.

[wraper]

They won't be able to start booting from that drive though on machines that do not have NVMe support in BIOS.

Get one of your old USB drives and use it for the /boot partition and bootloader, if the system has no other storage device.

Yes, that's why I wrote "start booting". However it a workaround requiring another drive and additional booting delay.

[bdunham7]

Example: an  i7-4790K running W10 with an SSD still flies.  Will it benchmark as good as a newer/faster CPU?. No, but it still flies!

Now if you have a machine with only "a few" applications installed, 

I have two old machines with no plans to replace.

One is my HTPC that I built with a i7-3770K.  It was (SATA) SSD from the beginning, but I upgraded to a 1TB Samsung and a 4K GPU when I was forced to downgrade to W10 from W7 and abandon Media Center.  The only thing it does that takes any amount of time is compressing/reencoding video files using Handbrake, and for that the latest, fastest versions would be faster, but not twice as fast--at least not for doing one file at a time.  Handbrake only uses about 3 cores at most per instance and per-core performance hasn't gone up as much as other parameters.  It easily plays videos while simultaneously encoding, so not much room for 'improvement'.

The other is my backup laptop, even older with an i7-2630QM and a Samsung 830 as the OS drive.  Among many other things it has a fully paid-up educational version of Adobe Photoshop (and other apps, the whole CS-5 suite) that cannot be reinstalled or licensed on any other machine.

Both of these machines would be intolerable with even a very fast spinning HDD, yet with a SATA SSD I'm not even considering replacing them.   

[David Hess]

I have had multiple data corruption problems with Samsung 870 EVO drives.

The only problem I have had with Crucial MX500 drives are 2TB models that had a hang bug when used with certain controllers (AMD Ryzen processors?), but there was a firmware update which fixed this.

It would be nice if firmware updates were available to run on any operating system, however it is not too taxing to temporarily install Windows on a system to update SSD firmware before putting the drives into service.

[BradC]

It would be nice if firmware updates were available to run on any operating system, however it is not too taxing to temporarily install Windows on a system to update SSD firmware before putting the drives into service.

I have a "Windows2Go" install of Win10 on a (fast) USB drive. It'll boot on pretty much anything eventually and can be used to do firmware updates on SSDs. The best part is having a clean backing file so I can replace the Windows config damage after it's done.

[David Hess]

It would be nice if firmware updates were available to run on any operating system, however it is not too taxing to temporarily install Windows on a system to update SSD firmware before putting the drives into service.

I have a "Windows2Go" install of Win10 on a (fast) USB drive. It'll boot on pretty much anything eventually and can be used to do firmware updates on SSDs. The best part is having a clean backing file so I can replace the Windows config damage after it's done.

I have a bunch of Windows 10 systems, including my laptop, but for my old workstation which is currently running FreeBSD, I have a Windows 10 boot SSD that I can swap in if needed.

[JoeRoy]

Samsung 970 Pro is the only MLC you can find (for a reasonable price).

[Infraviolet]

I don't think the 970 pro could work for me, I'm only looking at 2.5 inch SATA. This is for a laptop, I don't recall if it has fancy slots for non-SATA drives and can't tell without a slow and painful disassembly procedure. I'm therefore after a long-term-reliable 2.5 inch SATA SSD of a capacity the same as the HDDs I've gotten used to (1TB) to make a simple drop-in replacement*, I don't want to be trying to fidle with having multiple drives in the machine for different purposes, if multiple drives could fit at all.

*not sure if when doing so I'm better doing a fresh OS install on the SSD, then restoring from a timeshift external drive to get Mint back to my settings and programs, or doing some sort of dd of my existing drive to the SSD then putting it in and trying to boot straight to that.

[Haenk]

Not buying due to reports on the internet? That's BS.
Sure, at times, there is a bad batch, but that's rare.
Buy a quality brand one, I have mainly installed Samsung. Get a PRO edition, I would not bother spending a bit more for them - as they are really cheap now anyway.
Don't buy questionable chinese brands off Amazon. They are usually junk.

[Jeroen3]

If you have such high requirements just buy datacenter drives. And buy n+1 and put them in sw-raid.

I have 8 used (80-90%) Micron M600 1TB in a Windows Storage Space (4tb) and it works great. It's fast and it will remain fast the entire 4 TB.

[Infraviolet]

For SSDs does anyone know if Amazon's fulfilled by Amazon orders are safe for major brand SSDs (Samsung, Crucial...)? Or if there are loads of fakes on sale there? Guessing any which are sold as major brands but coming from a self-delivering seller with an unpronounceable name are probably fakes with the same internals as whatever no-name ones are sold under Chinese brands?

[David Hess]

I have had multiple data corruption problems with Samsung 870 EVO drives.

I finally gave up on the Samsung 870 EVO because of data corruption.  I am not sure what happened.  Maybe the 4TB 870 EVO draws too much power for my USB 3.0 enclosures, or maybe the 870 fakes synchronous writes to improve performance at the expense of reliability.  None of my 2TB Crucial MX500s have had a problem.

Continuous write speed of the Samsung 870 EVO was also not any better than the Crucial MX500s, and both were *slower* then the 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530 hard drives that I have started using.

[Veteran68]

Maybe the 4TB 870 EVO draws too much power for my USB 3.0 enclosures, or maybe the 870 fakes synchronous writes to improve performance at the expense of reliability. 

Both of our experiences are anecdotal, but while I can't speak to the 4TB 870 EVO, I've had a 4TB 870 QVO (cheaper) drive installed internally in my main desktop since Dec 2020 and it's been great. Some reviewers claimed it would be a slower & less reliable drive than the EVO, but that has not been my experience at all. It's the only 2.5" SATA SSD in this desktop, the other 3 are M.2 NVMe drives (two of which are Samsung gen4's, one a Silicon Power gen3).

[David Hess]

Maybe the 4TB 870 EVO draws too much power for my USB 3.0 enclosures, or maybe the 870 fakes synchronous writes to improve performance at the expense of reliability.

Both of our experiences are anecdotal, but while I can't speak to the 4TB 870 EVO, I've had a 4TB 870 QVO (cheaper) drive installed internally in my main desktop since Dec 2020 and it's been great. Some reviewers claimed it would be a slower & less reliable drive than the EVO, but that has not been my experience at all. It's the only 2.5" SATA SSD in this desktop, the other 3 are M.2 NVMe drives (two of which are Samsung gen4's, one a Silicon Power gen3).

I think the drive got corrupted after I moved it to a USB enclosure, but the nature of the corruption affecting the metadata makes me think it was a synchronous write problem where the drive reported a synchronous write completed, but it was not and more data was sent and then power was lost.

Maybe it is just a questionable drive but diagnostics reported no problems.

[Infraviolet]

Has anyone had corruption with the 1TB drives? Not sure how different the large capacity 4TB units might infact be internally as vs more standard 1TB units of supposedly the same model name. It wasn't that long ago after all that a 1TB HDD was the largest commonly found, so 4TB SSDs are quite a new thing by comparison.

[David Hess]

Has anyone had corruption with the 1TB drives? Not sure how different the large capacity 4TB units might infact be internally as vs more standard 1TB units of supposedly the same model name. It wasn't that long ago after all that a 1TB HDD was the largest commonly found, so 4TB SSDs are quite a new thing by comparison.

I only have 250GB and 2TB SSDs.  At this point I have collected a set of 4 x 250GB Crucial BX500s which were replaced with 250GB Crucial MX500s, so I think I will use them in RAID10 on my motherboard as a boot volume rather than let them sit around until useless.

[magic]

I think the drive got corrupted after I moved it to a USB enclosure

I have had bizarre incidents of data corruptions with USB enclosures, I simply don't trust those things as a matter of principle.

Even with the ones that seem to pass testing, I recently started to use BTRFS because it detects silent corruption.
Metadata redundancy (duplication) is also possible with it.

When I have to read an internal disk on a USB bridge, any important data I read twice and compare.

[thm_w]

For SSDs does anyone know if Amazon's fulfilled by Amazon orders are safe for major brand SSDs (Samsung, Crucial...)? Or if there are loads of fakes on sale there? Guessing any which are sold as major brands but coming from a self-delivering seller with an unpronounceable name are probably fakes with the same internals as whatever no-name ones are sold under Chinese brands?

If its shipped and sold by amazon, its generally safe. Though in Canada if you buy a samsung SSD from amazon it will not be under warranty (grey market). So you're better off buying elsewhere.
There are definitely many fakes available, just moreso on aliexpress and not in the top amazon results.

[tridac]

Slowly upgrading to an ssd future, now that enterprise quality ssd are becoming more affordable second user. Present server and development host is running FreeBSD 12,  has two 200Gb in a mirrored zfs root for the os, and 6 x 800Gb in a zfs raidz pool for data. Drives are Samsung, HGST or Toshiba with SAS interface. There was some risk to start, as no mention of wear index in the ads for the drives,  but using smart utils, (smartctl -a <device>) which extracts the drive info, the wear index is less than 5% for all of them, with some showing zero. It's a work in progress, as funds allow, but enterprise class sas drives from Samsung or HGST, for example, seem to be a good bet second user. Boot times and power consumption are much improved as well...

[Infraviolet]

The samsung 870 EVO is still a particular model to really avoid then? Or are things better with more recently manufactured ones?

[voltsandjolts]

You started this thread 8 months ago.
What did you buy in the end?
Or are you still waiting for "the one"?

[hans]

If you read back the OP, then the 870 EVO had "certain batches" that failed.

In other words, if you get a drive from that batch: upgrade firmware (if that helps) or return it. Otherwise consider it anecdotal evidence which says nothing about the general quality, as we don't know how what the failure rate is.


There is no "the one". Every manufacturer will screw up in one way or another, as that is what Murphy's law predicts. If all it takes is a small scandal to blacklist a manufacturer, then there is no mfgr left.

[Halcyon]

I stick with Crucial/Micron or Intel these days.

[tom66]

I just plugged in an old SSD from a system of mine.  It's 10 years old and everything seems fine with the drive.  120GB manufactured by PNY.  I also have a 6 year old MX500 drive in this system.  I think as long as these drives aren't write-abused, they should last a long time.

Meanwhile my Home Assistant instance died last night as the SD card in the Raspberry Pi crapped itself.  It went read only, which the Pi doesn't want to boot from, but I was fortunately able to recover data from it.  My guess is the bad block table has hit its limit.  At least they built the facility into it to allow data recovery before it is too late.  Also a good proof of my Docker backup strategy... NOT... everything fell apart... but at least I know now!