Most reliable SSD Brand?

I'm going to be building a new PC after 10 years. I've pretty much figured out everything but the storage. I was going to go with a Samsung NVME cause I've read they are extremely reliable but the software seems a bit invasive? and its a huge privacy concern of mine. Anyone else have some reliable brands they've used? soykaf that wont just fail on you or software that is really invasive.

>>79190 Samsung 970 PRO Samsung 970 PRO

>SSD >the software SSDs don't need special software, they work through standard NVMe or SATA interfaces. You plug it in and it works. If you mean Samsung Magician (https://www.samsung.com/us/memory-storage/magician-software/), that's to data harvest gullible people: >In order to provide Samsung Magician to you, to authenticate you and your device(s, and to provide other services related to your use of Samsung Magician), we need to collect information on you and the device through software on your device. For example, we may collect information including your IP address, the serial numbers and device IDs of the devices you use in connection with Samsung Magician, the number of drivers installed on your PC or device used to access Samsung Magician. MAYBE the proprietary software offers a 1% improvement in SOME metrics, but I'd look at independently tested evidence for that before trading my personal data for it. If you wanna check disk health and other SMART data, use CrystalDiskInfo or other standard tools. There's the tech questions thread >>76457 for these dumbass questions.

>>79190 WD / Samsung are good- they had that driver hiccup that happen one time but im pretty sure thats a royal fuarrrkup that will hopefully never happen again. >>79192 pretty sure that thread has hit max posts. you cant post anymore, i tried to reply.

>>79191 >Samsung 970 PRO counterargument to that: the whole firmware fuarrrkery of Samsung 980 PRO rendering them unusable i would personally go for the ADATA drives, they're not the biggest brand out there, but i've used their ssds 8-12 hours daily intensively (boot drives, downloads/torrent/soulseek folders) and they've never failed to deliver, while remaining relatively cheap. if i could choose what drive my new laptops came with i would probably choose ADATA. also, some cautionary words, stay as far away as possible from kingston, over here where i live i see them everywhere and having 10+ years on the puter repair business they've been by far the worse out there, but this also includes pendrives and ram memories. they use half decent flash modules and controllers BUT they always, always cheap on the SMD resistors and capacitors, they inevitably will die on you, and their warranty service is awful, i've heard from someone that works building OEM machines that bought kingston ssds in bulk, that around 30% of them failed after less than a month and kingston did some mental gymnastics to justify why the warranty was void. of course this could be a particularly bad batch but even then i've had enough of kingston to just try to caution others about those electronic storage devices

My OS is installed on a western digital SN850X, for pretty much no other reason than its performance. I would avoid Gen 5 SSDs; they aren't better enough yet to justify the price difference with gen 4. >>79191 My 970 evo plus died after less than two years. No idea why.

Some dirty little not-so-secrets of SSDs: SLC >> MLC > TLC >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> QLC Each additional bit per cell halves error margins and requires more precise programming and more complex (== slower) reads, for diminishing returns. MLC to TLC improves density by 50%, at the expense of halving error margins. TLC to QLC improves density by 33%, at the expense of halving error margins. PLC (if it ever actually materializes) improves density by 25%, at the expense of... halving error margins. And meanwhile operations are all slower. Sometimes substantially so. Unfortunately a lot of new "TLC" drives are QLC-optimized flash that's run in TLC mode. This is still better than QLC, but QLC-optimised flash tends to be substantially worse for TLC than TLC-optimized flash. Client drives (== drives that an individual person might buy) tend to be best-effort, where they put in a fair bit of effort into recovering data, even if it might be incorrect. Whereas enterprise drives (think server farms) tend to be tuned more towards making absolutely 100% sure that they return the correct data, and if not erroring out quickly. 99.9th percentile latency is very important, and most benchmarks ignore it on consumer drives. (And most manufacturers don't spec it either.) This is one reason why enterprise drives - especially certain vendors that actually care about long-tail latency - can end up being far more responsive even in client workloads than client drives. A hitch every few minutes is still very annoying. But as even the benchmarkers that do measure this tend to not bother to measure this for long enough that the drive gets out of cache, these numbers are hard to find. For random write in particular to actually hit steadystate often requires you to random-write the drive multiple times. The sort of state that your system will often get into over months to years and then you wonder why everything runs terribly... Client drives tend to be DRAM-less to save $$; enterprise drives tend to have a fair bit of DRAM on board. DRAM helps defrag and random-access performance a fair bit, though doesn't help sequential access much at all. This is another source of hiccoughs on client drives. Real-world performance of QLC drives can be shockingly bad. Take a QLC drive, fill it mostly full of 'homework', do scattered random writes, and watch it start to hiccough - sometimes to the point of multi-minute latencies. I've seen drives outright drop off the bus from NVMe timeouts before. Then toss it in the back of a trailer for a week and watch even reads stutter due to the heroics they have to do to recover the data. Then toss it back in for the rest of the summer and find you have an expensive brick because oops an important part of the FTL bitrotted into heatdeath. General rule of thumb for endurance on drive datasheets - if they exist and actually mean anything at all, at least - true SLC drives will typically do multiple orders of magnitude over the datasheet. True TLC drives will often do an order of magnitude over the datasheet. QLC drives in theory will do exactly what the datasheet says if you follow their exact optimistic 'accelerated aging' test. And don't ask about rated temperature. Speaking of endurance, spec'd endurance for drives tends to be based on the best case. Writes that aren't just straight sequential can be >4x as damaging to the drive, endurance-wise. Running a drive near-full tends to be terrible for performance, especially 'random' hitches. This is because the garbage collection has to work a whole lot harder with less free space to work with. This is far more of a problem for QLC than TLC or lower. Fabs can't just put out 100% top-of-the-barrel NAND. There's always a spread, that then gets binned. Top-of-the-line goes towards (space &) aerospace, then next tier down goes to automotive & industry, then enterprise SSDs, then client SSDs, then decent memory cards, then cheap memory cards & thumb drives. Client drives tend to have a small bit of 'cache', just large enough that the initial quick benchmarks people tend to run end up measuring the cache instead of the actual drive performance. And the actual drive performance is often shockingly bad. If you're doing benchmarks on a client drive, at a bare minimum start by filling it first with random data. (And I do mean random. Not only do some drives 'optimize' zeroes, some drives 'optimize' other commonish bitpatterns as well now. Cat-and-mouse against benchmarkers, sigh. Easily defeated once-and-for-all at least.) Client drives have a shocking number of wrong-data bugs. Or rather, all SSDs do - the software complexity on the drive itself is to the point where that's a given - but enterprise drives actually have effort put into early testing to catch the issues before they go to the customer, and also (just as importantly) have contractual obligations not to tell the customer that 'there are no incorrect-data bugs' while they are running around pants-on-fire due to a known incorrect-data bug with no fix in sight, so wrong-data bugs are often actually fixed. Client drives tend to completely punt power-loss protection. Or rather, they will quite happily lie to the host and say that writes are done before they are actually done - and then if you lose power, welp, you just lost data. (And that's if your lucky. If they didn't quite code the FTL correctly, you just lost the drive. And see above re: bugs....) Enterprise drives either (for the slow ones) will obligingly do the write (slow), or have enough capacitance onboard to lie to the host and get away with it - they will panic & frantically save the data before they truly lose power. (It's pretty obvious if you can look at the circuit board. Does it have a comically large amount of capacitance onboard? If so, great.) Client drives tend to care a lot about full-idle power; enterprise drives tend to care a lot about power under load. Warning that enterprise drives tend to assume a fair bit of cooling - though they tend to also be better-tested as to their behavior under thermal throttling than client drives. PSA: U.2 to pcie adapter cards exist and are reasonable. M.2 drives are almost always thermally bottlenecked, and their performance will drop off a cliff once they heat up. Sometimes to the point of just outright stopping for a few seconds (which can lead to e.g. desktop freezing, etc, etc.). Yes, this means that the 'silly' NVMe SSD heatsinks can be a non-bad idea - at least if the heatsink is actually cooling the NAND. If an NVMe drive needs custom proprietary software to be competitive, the drive is just cheating (such as by removing 'unnecessary' drive cache flushes). In theory a driver can take advantage of e.g. figuring out what data is likely to be untouched for a while and grouping it in a separate write stream; in practice lol I have literally never seen proprietary software do this effectively. They all just cheat while siphoning usage stats instead. PCIe gen4 is about where the bottleneck shifted from PCIe performance to maximum allowed power. As a result most gen5 SSDs are somewhat underwhelming - PCIe is no longer the main bottleneck. This is slowly shifting as vendors figure out how to reduce power consumption, but slowly. Sometimes I'm astounded that anything works at all.

>>79253 >>U.2 The U.2 SSDs I'm seeing on newegg are priced pretty absurdly at like $.20/GB

>>79253 Amazing read, thank you.

>>79253 thanks for the insights anon

>>79190 >Most reliable SSD Brand? Samsung, Kingston and Crucial are the best. If you are looking for something cheap then I suggest Kingston KC600 because it's the cheapest m.2 NVME SSD with DRAM that I could find. Make sure to search the web whether the exact model has had defective firmware. I recommend that you always upgrade the firmware before you start using your new SSD. Crucial MX500 is also a great option, If you don't need a NVME drive and you can instead use a regular SATA SSD. >>79253 Great write-up!

Don't cheap out if you got data that would be painful to lose. But while there's worse and better brands, assume that any drive can fail on you. The most safe drive is thus one you backup automatically. However I've yet to find a good software for "home use". Any suggestions?

>>79315 There are many backup solutions. I hope that this post is readable (sorry, it just kept on expanding). >However I've yet to find a good software for "home use". Firstly, file system snapshots (btrfs, zfs, LVM, snapper) can't be your only backup strategy because they won't be useful in all possible disastrous scenarios. They are very good for rolling back upgrades, however. But much better strategy is to take incremental backups in addition to snapshots. I personally use mksquashfs to make snapshots and rsync to make incremental backups. But it can be less clean solution than it ideally should be. RAID can be also useful but it's not a backup solution. I'm thinking about maybe having RAID1 on the machine that stores backups? Re: Snapshots... >https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM#Snapshots Relevant quote: >"A CoW snapshot is not a backup, because it does not make a second copy of the original data. " Storing your snapshots on the same machine where you store your original data is not a real backup at all! It doesn't help you if your SSD dies, your machine gets stolen or it's destroyed in a fire. And often it's hard to just grab 1 file or 1 folder from a snapshot (you need to restore the whole ZFS/BTRFS/LVM snapshot somewhere and then copy the 1 folder that you actually needed). Also, FYI, you can mount a squashfs snapshot RO with mount --options loop , and Midnight Commander can be used to browse some compressed archive formats (at least .zip files but I think it also supports .tar.gz) and you can add/remove/copy files like you normally can do with regular files/dirs. >Any suggestions? The most basic version is to write a script that uses rsync but it can be painful and it's easy to mess up or not backup everything. You can automate it with Cron daemon (like cronie) or you can use SystemD timers. On Windows, the closest equivalent would be robocopy but remember that it always copies whole directories and it doesn't understand individual files! I recently found about Unison but I haven't used it. Links: >https://cheat.sh/rsync (the man-page is not very good) >https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync#As_a_backup_utility (the provided script is pretty basic. you want to read the cheat.sh page and tinker on your own) >https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Cron (I think this is better than the ArchWiki page) A much better approach would be to use Borg (I have also heard good things about Restic). I heard that Vorta (or Pika Backup) provide a GUI for Borg but I haven't tested either one. In addition, you should also use etckeeper (I know it's not backup!). But do not share your etckeeper repo because it contains sensitive data! Also Your backup drives shouldn't be connected to the same machine that stores the original data. Your backups should be also resistant to theft, ransomware and disasters like your house burning down. If you use cloud storage, you need to locally encrypt your data before sending it to the cloud storage. Some backup software has built-in support for this but otherwise you can just use GnuPG. For easy mode you can use gpg --symmetric if you want to (it's certainly much harder to lose access to the backup if you use it but...). Google Drive and MEGA provide cloud storage for free but they probably aren't as trustworthy/private as they should be (you probably also want to use rclone if you decide to use cloud storage, although rsync can also be used with OpenSSH). There are also backup software that are designed to be used over a network. These include UrBackup, Restic (it's optional) , Tarsnap and Burp. P.S. If you aren't making backups because it's complicated then just use Gnome Deja Dup because it's the simplest GUI backup tool in the world. It's always better to have backups than not to have anything, and you can later move to another backup solution if you want to.

>some chink flash soykaf is extremely reliable okay nigger why are you simping this hard over one component in the first place and not having backups in a 10 year period i probably have 20 main hdds that broke even ones that just sit there doing nothing all day. i only started buying ssds this year because its now the only way to use a mainstream OS on my lab mules without them freezing all day >>79313 >the only 3/5 that exist are the best gooo goo gaa gaaa i hate computer glitterboys so fuarrrking much, the PC scene has failed 30 years ago you are little mutts bathing in the leftovers

>>79253 This is one of the most useful tech posts I have ever read. Thank you.

>>79315 Ive not done it before but maybe Syncthing + an NAS?

>>79326 >chink flash soykaf Fanxiang supremacy I've been using them for years glory to the motherland they been reliable as fuaark have 2 crucials for mass storage and 8 Fanxiang 2.5in in my server and they've been perfect Think again before you talk about "chink flash soykaf" no need to be racist you hick fuarrrk Where do you think all the nand chips come from? US doesn't make that soykaf it's all China and Taiwan Be better, hate less

i tend to just use samsung or sandisk ssds, since i keep finding them used locally. i've used a crucial ssd in a computer with no problems for 4+ years going evangelion rebuild was soykaf

My Acer FA-100 just werks. Why do I have to needlessly expand the size of my message when that's is all I want to say? Brevity is the sovl of wit. Well, whatever happened to that?

If you want your data to be stored and then also reliably retrievable, store your data somewhere using ZFS. In my view, data not stored on ZFS with proper physical redundancy is data that has not been successfully stored. If you go through enough disks or have a couple episodes of something that wasn't supposed to happen, you'll have this view too. Higher priced SSDs generally (not always but generally) go through better quality control. For personal laptops I choose machines I can put two NVMe SSDs in so all data is stored on a zpool that is a mirror (on two disks). For some smaller laptops I have been able to put a physically smaller NVMe disk in the WWAN slot. I don't mind the cost for a redundant SSD. The disruption of the zpool being offline would be far too great, especially when traveling.

>>81338 ZFS + ECC RAM, Is there OpenZFS support in linux today?

>>81362 ZFSOnLinux is based on OpenZFS and has been stable for more than five years. The same OpenZFS codebase is upstream for both FreeBSD and Linux. Ubuntu and Debian have ZFS in their package channels.

>>79248 Just wanted to say I've had the same experience. Kingston and Samsung always die. The samsung usually get SMART errors, block errors at least in the first few weeks. I've actually have 5 different kingston DoA or die within a few minutes of writing to them new out of the box. I've also have an old ADATA SSD that is still running after a decade. So far I've only had 2 ADATA drives have problems perhaps out of at least 20. But I think it's normal wear and tear to be expected. Never had an ADATA DoA. Also SanDisk had one die immediately after an OS install and then I went to copy in a 5GB file. Catastrophic IO/RW smart errors. All within 6 hours of having just bought from the store. This was the first time I bought a SanDisk drive. Basically my conclusion is stick with ADATA. I only bought the SanDisk because I needed something quick and it was all that was available. Now I stock up on ADATA. If not clear, everything I mentioned is all SSD not HDD, I don't want to proofread.

>>79253 A welcome wall of text! Do you have similar information for SD/MicroSD cards and USB flash drives?

>>79315 I use RClone (for copying to another hard drive) and Backblaze B2 (cloud backup solution).

>>82009 Samsung had a critical firmware bug since 800 series that required an update to avoid quick dead. Newer ones where shipped updated but there are some 800 and 900 models with it. If you have drives use their tool to check firmware version. That aside drive lifetime depends on writes. SSD's in heavy use wont live a decade. You can however pull out a 20y old ssd and still read from it cause apparently only writes degrade. At least it worked when i read from a 32gb drive from god knows when.

>>79190 I have zero technical advice on good SSDs; however, I can recommend Blue. I've had a 1tb drive from them that's gone strong without issues for seven years now. On the other hand, avoid Lexar. I recently purchased one for an X220 and it died within four months of use. Goodbye, sweet prince; you served me well for three months, and will serve me well as a coaster in your death.

flash media can be malicious! >https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291400_-_the_exploration_and_exploitation_of_an_sd_memory_card_-_bunnie_-_xobs

>>82009 >kingston and samaung bad, get ADATA 1000x this. For a moment i thought i was reading my own comment only to realize it was someone else's. I've had countless problems regarding Kingston as a technician in a decade of fixing computers, anything kingston is going to fail sooner rather than later. I've seen this with ssds, ram, and thumbdrives. ADATA, i've had the same ssd for 9 years now as my main drive, 120gb i've used and abused, and it never failed me (i still do backups to be honest) once Samsung i don't have enough experience but what others mentions is the same i',ve heard on other forums, Samsung has firmware errors that kill the drives

Besides manufacturers (looks like I'm getting an ADATA...), what should I keep in mind about sizes, form factors, etc? Like the equivalent of 5400 vs 7200 RPM or preferring 2 1TB drives to 1 2TB drive with HDDs? Anything you can think of. I'm looking for large amounts of external/portable storage. All my simple mind can get out of >>79253 is to try to find enterprise-marketed models. (How would I find out how hot a certain model gets?)

>>83180 bump just give me a model number to be honest

Consumer-grade storage lifespan: Years 10