Cheap, but reliable SSDs?
from agressivelyPassive@feddit.de to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 04:32
https://feddit.de/post/11461659

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.

#selfhosted

threaded - newest

Jumuta@sh.itjust.works on 26 Apr 04:42 next collapse

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?

henfredemars@infosec.pub on 26 Apr 04:42 next collapse

Price 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.

agressivelyPassive@feddit.de on 26 Apr 05:43 collapse

It’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.

MalReynolds@slrpnk.net on 26 Apr 08:51 collapse

If 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…

wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 02:30 collapse

Well, except when a second drive dies 36 hours later and suddenly you are panicking…

MalReynolds@slrpnk.net on 27 Apr 04:50 collapse

Yep, as can happen easily if you buy in a batch. Just like ransom (related, no?), non-sequential serial numbers please.

just_another_person@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 04:58 next collapse

Just stick with known vendors, and find a good price. Make sure you have a solid warranty and backups, and you’ll be fine.

David_Eight@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 05:17 next collapse

If you live by a Micro Center, their house brand is pretty good.

agressivelyPassive@feddit.de on 26 Apr 05:44 collapse

The closest one is about a trip over the Atlantic away.

wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 02:41 next collapse

“honeyyyy, I figured out our vacation plans!”

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Apr 05:43 collapse

Seems reasonable. I know a guy with a fishing boat (that’s a joke, I live no where near the ocean)

ladicius@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 05:18 next collapse

You mean “cheap or reliable”. And even with the better brands it’s always the question not if but when a device will fail.

agressivelyPassive@feddit.de on 26 Apr 05:40 next collapse

Honestly, 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?

Kangy@feddit.uk on 26 Apr 07:35 next collapse

It’s exactly those kind of responses that makes me scared to ask questions when I need help in the Linux community…

It adds absolutely nothing to anything

Edit: I’ve got a WD Green and a Crucial NVMe drive in my current gaming rig and those have been solid

ladicius@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 10:31 collapse

Don’t be scared. Just don’t fall for posts which try to get the impossible. It’s not that difficult.

ladicius@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 10:31 collapse

I commented on the title of your post - nobody with some knowledge in that field (as you claim to have) would phrase that question that way.

Be offended, I can’t change that - but pointing out the obvious may help others to not make the mistake of hoping that there’s cheap good.

There isn’t.

agressivelyPassive@feddit.de on 26 Apr 13:02 collapse

Oh, I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t use the exact wording that the semantic overlord required for his incantations.

Let’s recap, you only read the title, which by definition does not contain all the information, you wrote an extremely arrogant and absolutely not helpful comment, if challenged you answer with even more arrogance, and your only defense is nitpicky semantics, which even if taken at face value, do not change the value of your comment at all.

You are not helping anyone. No, not even others.

ladicius@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 14:41 collapse

Your reading comprehension is a bit off - I didn’t write that I only read the title, I wrote that I commented on the title.

The rest of your rant is up to you.

agressivelyPassive@feddit.de on 26 Apr 14:48 collapse

See, again, nitpicky details, even though we both know exactly what was meant.

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Apr 05:42 collapse

CALM DOWN!!!

Just kidding I don’t care I just though it would be fun to respond with a nonsensical comment

LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org on 27 Apr 09:13 collapse

By that logic, nothing is reliable…? Because you could say that about literally anything

ladicius@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 19:39 collapse

That’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).

Boomkop3@reddthat.com on 26 Apr 05:46 next collapse

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

Whirling_Cloudburst@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 06:20 next collapse

Teamgroup makes decent enough products.

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Apr 05:41 next collapse

I bought one of there drives and it died very young. 0/10 can’t recommend

Moonrise2473@feddit.it on 27 Apr 06:22 collapse

Bought 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

BillDaCatt@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 06:48 next collapse

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.

Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de on 26 Apr 06:54 next collapse

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.

Moonrise2473@feddit.it on 27 Apr 06:15 collapse

I’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

corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca on 26 Apr 06:55 next collapse

When 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.

ponchow8NC@lemmynsfw.com on 26 Apr 07:05 collapse

Yeah their MX series have been nice to me

I_Miss_Daniel@kbin.social on 26 Apr 08:24 next collapse

Not 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.

lemmyingly@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 01:11 collapse

I 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.

Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz on 26 Apr 08:55 next collapse

Acronyms, 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.

[Thread #713 for this sub, first seen 26th Apr 2024, 08:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Apr 09:48 next collapse

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.

kurcatovium@lemm.ee on 26 Apr 06:03 next collapse

We 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.

stalfoss@lemm.ee on 26 Apr 08:02 collapse

220TB 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

kurcatovium@lemm.ee on 26 Apr 09:35 next collapse

Yep, 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.

kurcatovium@lemm.ee on 29 Apr 06:56 collapse

Well, I remembered it wrong, it’s only 100 TB written. Still quite a lot IMO. Reads are 300 TB+ though.

i.ibb.co/YRxM11Z/ocz.png

DarkThoughts@fedia.io on 26 Apr 10:43 next collapse

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.

ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Apr 11:39 collapse

Just 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.

lemmyingly@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 01:08 collapse

I 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.

Adderbox76@lemmy.ca on 26 Apr 12:14 next collapse

I 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.

Paragone@lemmy.world on 26 Apr 23:51 next collapse

Reliability’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.

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Apr 05:38 collapse

If you put a sata drives in raid they can be pretty fast

lemmyingly@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 01:19 next collapse

I 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.

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Apr 05:37 collapse

I have two PHY drives that I installed in a server. They work just fine and I have no complaints

[deleted] on 27 Apr 05:42 next collapse

.

ColonelPanic@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 10:11 collapse

They did. Cheap and reliable

[deleted] on 27 Apr 20:40 collapse

.

HowManyNimons@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 21:02 collapse

We don’t like that you’re telling OP to pick two when they’ve already picked two.

[deleted] on 28 Apr 06:48 next collapse

.

[deleted] on 28 Apr 06:49 collapse

.

jjlinux@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 05:52 next collapse

Inland, Sabrent, XPG and PNY are all relatively inexpensive and very solid options for NVMe.

Moonrise2473@feddit.it on 27 Apr 06:12 next collapse

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

TheDorkfromYork@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 11:18 collapse

My understanding is that flash was under ordered so SSD prices will be high for a long while.

pineapplelover@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 06:15 next collapse

Crucial and wd are usually the cheapest and they’re reputable

pescetarian@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 13:33 collapse

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?!