I’m building an external SSD and I’ve been away from the technology for a while, so I wanted to ask if anyone has any observations about reliable (or conversely, unreliable) brands of M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs. I normally prefer Samsung, but as I’ve said, it’s been a while. Looking for 1T or 2T.
Opinions, anyone?
Up until very recently I’d have said go with Samsung, but a combination of recent funky firmware releases and some recent QC issues has given me pause.
Of late we’ve been sourcing ADATA drives with good success
@Desertlap : Thanks for the comment. Now that you mention it, I recall seeing some of the press about the F/W mods, but at the time I wasn’t able to dig into it.
As for ADATA, I have almost no experience with that brand. 1TB looks like it’s going to cost ~$150, so I’m going to take my time researching this purchase.
Anyone else have any good or bad experiences?
I have been using Samsung Pros since the 970s, for all my production builds (making sure to regularly update firmware using Magician) without issues.
Generally longer warranties and TBW indicate better manufacturer confidence, but my main philosophy is to assume your OS and working files are always just transient ‘hot’ data, backup accordingly, and specialize disks for different things:
I.e. your main system drive is about latency, scratch disk is about throughput, and NAS is about redundancy, with the last application being the focus for reliability (but generally geared towards HDDs, though NAS SSD storage is becoming more popular).
Other than Samsung’s recent snafus, there’s not much in them. The Samsung ones are usually marginally better.
I like WD or Kioxia. I used to go for Crucial, but that was because they used to offer MLC. Now everyone is using TLC or worse.
@Tams : I used to like Crucial, too, but that was years ago. I can get a $50 “deal” on a Western Digital SSD, but I think it’s one of their lower quality lines. Not sure that I want that…
I also used to buy Toshiba (now Kioxia?) disk drives, but again, that was a long time ago.
Thanks for your comments.
Hmm… I’m thinking I might have benefited from this thread a week ago before I ordered two Crucial M2 units. (A 1Tb and a 512Gb).
Hopefully they’ll perform according to spec.
Not a great loss if they don’t, however. Memory is quite affordable these days. The terabyte stick was only $69 CAD. And the 512 was $37.
Man…, I remember the days when spinners were around a buck a gig. -And we were happy!