6 ms·

Here's my problem: I'm glad to pay a premium for Sandisk if it guarantees reliable, honest, and accurate devices. I can buy generic flash drives for a fraction

by blagie 4y ago

Here's my problem: I'm glad to pay a premium for Sandisk if it guarantees reliable, honest, and accurate devices. I can buy generic flash drives for a fraction of the cost. If Sandisk is starting to cheat, why would I pay the premium? And if I'm willing to pay a premium, whom should I buy from? Sandisk, prior to WD, was expensive but honest. I was concerned this might happen, since WD has a bad track record here.

glintik 4y ago
SanDisk isn’t premium at all. And known for various issues.
- brookst 4y ago
  The used to be premium? Or at least I considered them to be. TIL. Who is a good premium brand today?
  - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
    Samsung has lines that are marketed for use in security cams, these have a high read/write cycle lifetime. They’re worth it for embedded devices like raspberry pi.
    - antongribok 4y ago
      I switched to Samsung from SanDisk about 7-8 years ago (when I first discovered this cheating on one of my SanDisk USB sticks) and haven't had any issues. BTW, there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi, I just buy the cheap stuff, but I buy much higher capacity than what I need. Overprovisioning this way is cheaper and more reliable in my opinion vs. buying something more exotic. For example for the most basic RPi install, I'll buy a 64GB microSD card. The card may only ever see less than 10 GB worth of data, but I know it'll last for years with plenty of chatty logs written to it daily. Source: I've been running RPis from the very first version, and have never had a single card fail on me, ever.
      - blagie 4y ago
        About two decades ago, there was a nice article about a hierarchy of memory cards. The chips are binned: - Reliable chips were placed in name-brand products - Defective chips have the defective parts disabled, and were placed in products on tier down. A 16MB chip might be sold as an 8MB. - Unreliable chips were given various error correcting techniques, and are placed in cheap, off-brand parts, as well as non-critical applications (such as, at the time, answering machines). A common technique was to scatter addresses, so errors were randomly distributed. For answering machines, this meant a little bit of static. For other applications, this meant a bit of ECC would make them quasi-reliable. Cards and chips down the line failed a lot more than at the top. I have had a few memory cards fail before. I am glad to pay for top-line parts. The premium I'm willing to pay is in the low tens of dollars, which is what Sandisk used to do.
      - magicalhippo 4y ago
        > there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi I found non-A1/A2 cards to be significantly slower, so these days I ensure they're at least A1 rated.
    - m463 4y ago
      yeah, but monitor the 980/970 evo plus issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648149
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Lacie still has real customer support for their professional products. Then again their cheapest pro product is several hundred dollars.
  - glintik 4y ago
    Kingston, Transcend - they have premium lines, pretty good IMHO.
  - fencepost 4y ago
    I've used Kanguru in the past but haven't really looked at USB drives since switching to IODD external SSDs. You might also look specifically for "Windows To Go Certified" flash drives - not because you're actually going to run Windows from them but because they should meet some decent minimums for speed and flash endurance.
- acdha 4y ago
  They used to be. Then Western Digital bought them, and this is how they advertised hard drives for years.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Their consumer-level portable flash drive stuff has been trash for a decade or two...overpriced, slow, high failure rate, and terrible/gimmicky cases. It's only their high-end stuff that was decent. For a long time, they were kings of the high-end CompactFlash and SD card market for photo/video work with their Extreme and Ultra lines. Lexar was the other major player there. A lot of other companies offered cheaper, better performing products particularly for USB flash drives.
- comboy 4y ago
  Then which brand is? And I'm mostly looking for reliable rather than premium.
  - ac29 4y ago
    Swissbit makes SLC and pSLC USB flash drives that should be significantly more reliable than typical consumer drives. They also cost 10x more. https://www.swissbit.com/en/products/nand-flash-products/usb-products/ https://www.swissbit.com/en/products/nand-flash-products/usb...
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      I don't need that many write cycles, though. I need a good controller, which can give me both high speed and high reliability with more bits per cell. So "should be" is not very enticing, especially if they want to charge 10x. As far as I can tell you can get generic flash chips and run them as SLC, so they should only need 3x the flash and 1x as much everything else. And actually looking at the prices here, it's about $120 for 32 gigacells. If you get the SLC model then you're not paying 10x the cost per byte, you're paying 40x the cost per byte.
      - dmitrygr 4y ago
        > so they should only need 3x the flash No, (2^3)x, as in 8x
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        You're mixing things up. TLC flash puts 3 bits into each cell. It's 3x as dense. The fact that it uses 8 voltage levels is only relevant to performance and durability. (Also 2^1 versus 2^3 is not 8x anyway.)
kvetching 4y ago
Same story with many brands. Rather than raise their prices, they cut quality. Do companies not understand why people were buying them to begin with? Bounty paper towels are the latest brand that I noticed. They always were superior, thick large sheets. Now they are on par with generics.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  At a certain point in the lifespan of the brand the reason the brand is well known becomes less the quality of the product than the recognition and "stickiness" of the brand itself. A certain mindset and approach has taken over a lot of companies where they want to pull a fast one on their customers and improve margins at the same time. They rely on the brand name to keep customers coming back (because research has shown that people are less likely to try a new brand in a product space over their chosen one, "'ol reliable", even if they complain about its falling quality) while lowering the quality of that product until the brand identity is all that differentiates the product from a competitor. This makes their margins better, competing with competitors, at the expense of the quality of the product. At least until customer perception sours. Then the brand engages in "artificial" rebranding by "returning their product to quality" and advertising it as such. A recent and famous example of this cycle was Domino's pizza, which was a stellar marketing campaign built on...their 'old' pizza sucking. Many hyper margin conscious companies rinse and repeat this cycle.
- cruano 4y ago
  Remember "brands" are not a thing, all companies are people and people care about themselves. If you join a company and cut the costs to "save money", you'll probably get a big bonus and then jump ship somewhere else so you don't suffer the consequences.
amelius 4y ago
Kingston and Samsung make decent drives.
- inasio 4y ago
  Samsung used to have the best regarded SSDs, especially their Pro line, but that's not the case anymore [0] [0] https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsung-ssd-reliability/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsu...
- ciupicri 4y ago
  "SSD shadiness: Kingston and PNY caught bait-and-switching cheaper components after good reviews", https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kingston-and-pny-caught-bait-and-switching-cheaper-components-after-good-reviews https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kin...
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Western Digital pulled the same bullshit: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326200-western-digital-caught-bait-and-switching-customers-with-slow-ssds https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326200-western-digital... It's long been suspected that PC hardware companies have been doing this sort of stuff. Camera manufacturers are also known for shipping review sample lenses that have been hand-assembled and perfectly calibrated, nowhere near the quality of calibration/assembly that ends up coming off the production line.
botverse 4y ago
It’s like the probably fake story of the MBA that removed an olive from the salads in the airline. They way they should finish by the story is with another MBA removing the rest of the olives, then another the space between seats, then another started to charge per bag… They just can’t see it.

by blagie 4y ago

glintik 4y ago

SanDisk isn’t premium at all. And known for various issues.

brookst 4y ago
The used to be premium? Or at least I considered them to be. TIL. Who is a good premium brand today?
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  Samsung has lines that are marketed for use in security cams, these have a high read/write cycle lifetime. They’re worth it for embedded devices like raspberry pi.
  - antongribok 4y ago
    I switched to Samsung from SanDisk about 7-8 years ago (when I first discovered this cheating on one of my SanDisk USB sticks) and haven't had any issues. BTW, there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi, I just buy the cheap stuff, but I buy much higher capacity than what I need. Overprovisioning this way is cheaper and more reliable in my opinion vs. buying something more exotic. For example for the most basic RPi install, I'll buy a 64GB microSD card. The card may only ever see less than 10 GB worth of data, but I know it'll last for years with plenty of chatty logs written to it daily. Source: I've been running RPis from the very first version, and have never had a single card fail on me, ever.
    - blagie 4y ago
      About two decades ago, there was a nice article about a hierarchy of memory cards. The chips are binned: - Reliable chips were placed in name-brand products - Defective chips have the defective parts disabled, and were placed in products on tier down. A 16MB chip might be sold as an 8MB. - Unreliable chips were given various error correcting techniques, and are placed in cheap, off-brand parts, as well as non-critical applications (such as, at the time, answering machines). A common technique was to scatter addresses, so errors were randomly distributed. For answering machines, this meant a little bit of static. For other applications, this meant a bit of ECC would make them quasi-reliable. Cards and chips down the line failed a lot more than at the top. I have had a few memory cards fail before. I am glad to pay for top-line parts. The premium I'm willing to pay is in the low tens of dollars, which is what Sandisk used to do.
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      > there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi I found non-A1/A2 cards to be significantly slower, so these days I ensure they're at least A1 rated.
  - m463 4y ago
    yeah, but monitor the 980/970 evo plus issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648149
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Lacie still has real customer support for their professional products. Then again their cheapest pro product is several hundred dollars.
- glintik 4y ago
  Kingston, Transcend - they have premium lines, pretty good IMHO.
- fencepost 4y ago
  I've used Kanguru in the past but haven't really looked at USB drives since switching to IODD external SSDs. You might also look specifically for "Windows To Go Certified" flash drives - not because you're actually going to run Windows from them but because they should meet some decent minimums for speed and flash endurance.
acdha 4y ago
They used to be. Then Western Digital bought them, and this is how they advertised hard drives for years.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Their consumer-level portable flash drive stuff has been trash for a decade or two...overpriced, slow, high failure rate, and terrible/gimmicky cases. It's only their high-end stuff that was decent. For a long time, they were kings of the high-end CompactFlash and SD card market for photo/video work with their Extreme and Ultra lines. Lexar was the other major player there. A lot of other companies offered cheaper, better performing products particularly for USB flash drives.
comboy 4y ago
Then which brand is? And I'm mostly looking for reliable rather than premium.
- ac29 4y ago
  Swissbit makes SLC and pSLC USB flash drives that should be significantly more reliable than typical consumer drives. They also cost 10x more. https://www.swissbit.com/en/products/nand-flash-products/usb-products/ https://www.swissbit.com/en/products/nand-flash-products/usb...
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    I don't need that many write cycles, though. I need a good controller, which can give me both high speed and high reliability with more bits per cell. So "should be" is not very enticing, especially if they want to charge 10x. As far as I can tell you can get generic flash chips and run them as SLC, so they should only need 3x the flash and 1x as much everything else. And actually looking at the prices here, it's about $120 for 32 gigacells. If you get the SLC model then you're not paying 10x the cost per byte, you're paying 40x the cost per byte.
    - dmitrygr 4y ago
      > so they should only need 3x the flash No, (2^3)x, as in 8x
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        You're mixing things up. TLC flash puts 3 bits into each cell. It's 3x as dense. The fact that it uses 8 voltage levels is only relevant to performance and durability. (Also 2^1 versus 2^3 is not 8x anyway.)

kvetching 4y ago

Same story with many brands. Rather than raise their prices, they cut quality. Do companies not understand why people were buying them to begin with? Bounty paper towels are the latest brand that I noticed. They always were superior, thick large sheets. Now they are on par with generics.

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
At a certain point in the lifespan of the brand the reason the brand is well known becomes less the quality of the product than the recognition and "stickiness" of the brand itself. A certain mindset and approach has taken over a lot of companies where they want to pull a fast one on their customers and improve margins at the same time. They rely on the brand name to keep customers coming back (because research has shown that people are less likely to try a new brand in a product space over their chosen one, "'ol reliable", even if they complain about its falling quality) while lowering the quality of that product until the brand identity is all that differentiates the product from a competitor. This makes their margins better, competing with competitors, at the expense of the quality of the product. At least until customer perception sours. Then the brand engages in "artificial" rebranding by "returning their product to quality" and advertising it as such. A recent and famous example of this cycle was Domino's pizza, which was a stellar marketing campaign built on...their 'old' pizza sucking. Many hyper margin conscious companies rinse and repeat this cycle.
cruano 4y ago
Remember "brands" are not a thing, all companies are people and people care about themselves. If you join a company and cut the costs to "save money", you'll probably get a big bonus and then jump ship somewhere else so you don't suffer the consequences.

amelius 4y ago

Kingston and Samsung make decent drives.

inasio 4y ago
Samsung used to have the best regarded SSDs, especially their Pro line, but that's not the case anymore [0] [0] https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsung-ssd-reliability/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsu...
ciupicri 4y ago
"SSD shadiness: Kingston and PNY caught bait-and-switching cheaper components after good reviews", https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kingston-and-pny-caught-bait-and-switching-cheaper-components-after-good-reviews https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kin...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Western Digital pulled the same bullshit: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326200-western-digital-caught-bait-and-switching-customers-with-slow-ssds https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326200-western-digital... It's long been suspected that PC hardware companies have been doing this sort of stuff. Camera manufacturers are also known for shipping review sample lenses that have been hand-assembled and perfectly calibrated, nowhere near the quality of calibration/assembly that ends up coming off the production line.

botverse 4y ago

It’s like the probably fake story of the MBA that removed an olive from the salads in the airline. They way they should finish by the story is with another MBA removing the rest of the olives, then another the space between seats, then another started to charge per bag… They just can’t see it.