Cheap, but reliable SSDs?
Cheap, but reliable SSDs?
I want to upgrade some of my older machines with some new, high(er) capacity SSDs (SATA and nvme). I don't need super high speeds, just something in the TB range in terms of storage.
Problem is, there's so much garbage out there, I can't really tell, which SSD is inexpensive and reliable and which is just utter garbage.
I thought about buying new, but last gen Samsung/WD SSDs.
Intenso and Fanxiang both seem to have been around for a few years, but reviews seem to be mixed.
Just stick with known vendors, and find a good price. Make sure you have a solid warranty and backups, and you'll be fine.
30Not Sandisk. Had several just die with no recovery possible.
Kingston had a few failures but probably OK as a cheap one.
Only had one Samsung crash, so mostly sell those despite the premium these days.14I had a friend who had a SanDisk and it also failed. I also think SanDisk thumb drives suck.
I've seen many Kingston drives at work fail, which I think is interesting because their thumb drives are some of the best. Actual USB 3 speeds and built well.
5
Crucial MX 500 & Samsung 870 Evo are reliable / good & "cheap" SATA SSDs. For NVMe there's the WD Blue SN570 and the Kioxia Exceria G2 but keep in mind that they tend to have smaller storage sizes too and depending on your use case you might not really notice a performance difference between SATA and NVMe anyway. Personally, I stay away from all native Chinese products. They tend to have terrible quality and fall apart quickly. I'm sure there's exceptions here and there but wading through all the garbage and having to buy twice does not seem worth it and I rather support that country as little as possible anyway.
13Just be aware that for a period of time the MX 500 had many reports of high failure rate. Not sure if it was due to a change of components or firmware.
Example post about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/whr5ek/crucial_mx500_historically_good_recent_batches/
An article (In Portuguese).
And another post about it.8I had one around 2012-2013 and it failed on me. I had issues with it throughout its life but I didn't realise it was the drive until I upgraded to a Samsung.
3
Crucial and wd are usually the cheapest and they're reputable
12When I needed them, Crucial bent over backwards for a single sale.
I've given them 100% of my business since for any solid-state stuff.
I'm just one internet dood but please include them in your list of candidates. They have several tiers of speed and resilience, and I'd love to see them get more business.
11Yeah their MX series have been nice to me
4
Personally I use Newmaxx's site and spreadsheet which has more indepth information about the SSDs like their controllers and NAND type - https://borecraft.com/
You can also check their subreddit for some reviews and such.
That and some stats from Backblaze and general reviews.
And I use price trackers to make sure I'm getting a good price.I don't like going by specific brands, because they all have some less ideal models and some of them tend to change some of the components after a while.
9Price to published write endurance might get you started, but I’m curious what answers you get because this is a difficult question IMHO. Actual reliability depends heavily on firmware which is a vendor-specific secret sauce.
7It's absolutely opaque to me, especially the non-big-name brands barely get any reliable reviews and especially given the silicon lottery, I can't tell if every chip is like the reviewed ones.
If I just happen to get the bad module that craps out after 6 months, the positive reviews are not that helpful.
3If I just happen to get the bad module that craps out after 6 months, the positive reviews are not that helpful.
That's what RAID(5) is for, if a drive craps out you just shrug and get a new one (or warranty), no data loss. Easy enough to cobble together with a PCIe card and 4ish smaller drives, faster too...
3
If you live by a Micro Center, their house brand is pretty good.
6The closest one is about a trip over the Atlantic away.
18"honeyyyy, I figured out our vacation plans!"
4Seems reasonable. I know a guy with a fishing boat (that's a joke, I live no where near the ocean)
1
I've had good luck with WD Blue NVME (SN550)
I've put several of those into machines at work and have had years without an issue. I'm also running a WD Blue SN550 1TB in my server as one of the caches, 25000 hours power on time, >100TB written, temperatures way higher than they should be and still over 93% health remaining according to smart.
6I'm also using that drive but it likes to stay toasty, it's always in a 60-65° C range even with a low activity
I don't really like that. Bought an heatsink and it improved a bit
1
I've got a couple machines running Kingston A400's well over their rated spec, those are decently fast and start at about 30 euros
6Kingston A400s and Crucial BXs have been very good as cheap SSDs in my experience.
3I used to like the a400, had a few of them in service, but a few years ago I tried another one and it was terrible. Just... Slow.. like an HDD. I did some research and apparently they changed something with the nand somewhere along the line. Did a bait and switch. I don't remember the details but it annoyed me.
I actually needed to buy a budget SSD just today, and I got a BX500. We'll see how it goes. I know not to expect much from a drive without DRAM, but at least I know that going in.
2
I noticed that the prices of SSD almost doubled in the last months. I bought a 2tb nvme for 89 euro and now it requires almost the double
WD and Seagate are using the AI hype as an excuse to increase prices on both SSD and HDD. They say AI bros are buying too many drives to store the models. I find this not really believable. Normal models are a few hundred GB, I don't think that they're pushing so much the demand
4My understanding is that flash was under ordered so SSD prices will be high for a long while.
2
I buy Samsung SSDs when I can afford them, Kingston when money is tight. Samsung is faster, especially their NVME drives. Both have been very reliable for me.
4We have hundreds of Samsung 860/870 EVOs in operation at my work now. All of them are working reliably in both windows and linux machines running 24/7 for years. Some more heavily used (local postgres db) are probably not in the best condition, but still working. Speaking of mostly 250 GB ones.
We used to buy OCZ brand. First OCZs (Vertex 3) were amazing, some of them are still in work for 10+ years. Vertex 460 still great, again, some are still in use. But ever since Toshiba came in and old models were replaced with Trion models, it went to shit. Some of those models in the same environment started to fail (and I mean critical failures, like no OS after reboot or missing data etc.) after less than a year. Some of them still run in less critical PCs with light use, but do I trust the brand? Hell no.
I just checked one 250 GB OCZ Vertex 3 running for ~10 years with Crystaldisk. It has over 220 TB written, 300 TB read, and crystaldisk still shows roughly 40% lifetime left. It ran in badly wented, really dusty Dell Optiplex with Windows XP.
Edit: Personally I also have good experience with Crucial/Micron too, but that's just based on home use for storing music, documents, steam games and not much else.
3220TB in 10 years on a 250GB disk means you are doing the equivalent of rewriting the entire disk every 4 days or so for 10 years
2Yep, it's a lot, but it should be right. Hope I did not misread the numbers. It runs quite write-heavy warehouse and cash register store database, running 24/7. I don't have the drive by me now, but I'll try to remember and post pic on Monday when I'm back to work.
3Well, I remembered it wrong, it's only 100 TB written. Still quite a lot IMO. Reads are 300 TB+ though.
1
Teamgroup makes decent enough products.
2I bought one of there drives and it died very young. 0/10 can't recommend
1Bought two and one of those died within 72 hours.
It was really weird, first it became read-only, then it zeroed by itself, but it still was read-only, no program was able to write on it, even aban (dban is dead)
Now the replacement has more than 2 years but i downgraded it in a low activity server
1
pretty sure the sn570/550 used to be a pretty good deal
iirc they don't sell it much anymore, maybe the sn580 is still a good deal?
2I have a friend who's in the computer repair business. He uses PNY drives because out of the hundreds he's installed, he's yet to see one come back with a faulty drive, unlike some of the other brands he's tried like Kingston. He gets the base size and base speed drives as his customers tend not to use a lot of data.
2I have two PHY drives that I installed in a server. They work just fine and I have no complaints
1
Inland, Sabrent, XPG and PNY are all relatively inexpensive and very solid options for NVMe.
1Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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1I used Crucial brand in both my desktop and my laptop upgrades a few years ago (I don't remember the exact model...mx500 maybe?) And I haven't had a single issue.
Absolutely rock-solid.
1Reliability's kinda high on my priority-list.
Try Samsung.
Nowadays I can't imagine using SATA for anything but archival storage ( get the fastest NVMe you can for your operating-system, and be stunned by how much quicker your machine is ).
Last time I was digging into stats, the reliability-rate for Samsung devices was much higher than that of Western Digital,
and the off-brands .. often are a bit of a bad-joke, for reliability ( Adata & Kingston, I'm looking at you, and will never trust such scum again ).
just my experience/opinion, is all.
0If you put a sata drives in raid they can be pretty fast
1
All SSD it's lottery, it doesn't matter WD, Kingdian or something else... And all them from China, don't de nationalist... IPhone made in China! So what?!
-3You mean "cheap or reliable". And even with the better brands it's always the question not if but when a device will fail.
-20Honestly, that is the typical self-righteous stackoverflow response that is helping no one.
You know exactly what I mean, you know exactly how to treat the question, but you chose to play captain obvious of the second arrogance division and posted this.
Of course devices will fail at some point, what are you even trying to add here?
24By that logic, nothing is reliable...? Because you could say that about literally anything
2That's in fact the point I was making, in this case about SSDs. Low prices don't help with reliability as producers use the worse part of a production run for the cheaper brands (friend of mine works for a European based manufacturer of silicon chips, and he can tell stories about the finicky processes around that tiny stuff and how they try to make the most of it).
1
