6 ms·

They don’t have much of one left as it is. It’s what happens with limited competition and no real repercussions from poor behavior that takes them in billions.

gruez 3y ago
>It’s what happens with limited competition What do you mean? The SSD space is pretty competitive. If you go on pcpartpicker.com and search for SSDs you see dozens of brands. Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together. That's kind of why I trust and prefer Samsung (yes, despite the firmware woes) and Micron (aka Crucial) for SSDs. Kioxia too, if we're talking enterprise. They're all in the business of making the actual NAND and maybe also the controller.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    So you trust the companies that have less competitors and outsized market power?
    - mlyle 3y ago
      They trust the companies that have ownership of key parts of the stack, rather than picking vendors for each piece and slapping them together. Such companies have a lot more internal expertise. Yes, it'd be nice to have more vendors like this, but you don't necessarily build a more robust industry just by having more vendors that buy NAND and a controller, make a few firmware tweaks for differentiation, and slap together a design based on an app note.
      - hakfoo 3y ago
        The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. If Samsung made flash that only worked with Samsung controllers and Samsung-exclusive PCB designs, they'd have a far smaller addressable market. I'm surprised we aren't seeing more flexibility out of the third-party market though. I could see someone saying "I'm willing to spend $100 for the most bestest possible 256Gb SSD for an industrial use case", and they'd sell you the parts that are normally sold as a 2TB MLC drive, but with a controller permalocked to using it all in psuedo-SLC cache mode, for example.
        mlyle 3y ago
        > The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. This is ignoring that there was a market for flash before we had NVME SSD controllers, and that there still is one. NVME is a big chunk of where flash goes now, but I don't think vertical integration is going to make flash disappear in the secondary market. In any case, -- yes, it's good to have a lot of manufacturers around for the industry. But it may not be as safe of a bet to buy from those other guys. There's enough gotchas in the design and support, and there's also the whole issue of supply chains and component quality.
  - jasomill 3y ago
    To Samsung's credit, they tend to fix firmware problems eventually. As such, by avoiding recently-released drives, I've had nothing but positive experiences with my fifteen or so Samsung drives, including several models that originally shipped with serious firmware bugs. While essentially obsolete at this point, I've also had excellent long-term experiences with (pre-WD) HGST SAS SSDs that use third-party (Intel) flash.
    - robotnikman 3y ago
      Same, I can vouch for them as well. I still have one thats nearly a decade old and still being used fine.
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      Kingston still seems to make their own flash and controllers too. They’ve been around for a long time (since the 80s, per Wikipedia) https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industrial https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industria...
      - ciupicri 3y ago
        Let's not forget the Kingston V300 scandal [1]: > The first generation V300 (which was sampled to media) used Toshiba's 19nm Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND but some time ago Kingston silently switched to Micron's 20nm asynchronous NAND. The difference between the two is that the Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface in the Toshiba NAND is good for up to 200MB/s, whereas the asynchronous interface is usually good for only ~50MB/s. The reason I say usually is that Kingston wasn't willing to go into details about the speed of the asynchronous NAND they use and the ONFI spec doesn't list maximum bandwidth for the single data rate (i.e. asynchronous) NAND. However, even though we lack the specifics of the asynchronous NAND, it's certain that we are dealing with slower NAND here and Kingston admitted that the Micron NAND isn't capable of the same performance as the older Toshiba NAND. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ss...
      - gruez 3y ago
  - ciupicri 3y ago
    Has Samsung replaced the SSDs with little life left because of their broken firmware?
- loeg 3y ago
  The HDD space has fewer vendors (especially in the consumer space).
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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  - quectophoton 3y ago
    It certainly seems that way. Earlier this year I was looking for internal 2.5" HDDs with more than 1TB of capacity, and I could only find Seagate drives. I try to always buy from different vendors, but in this case I had no choice but to buy 2 drives of the same model.
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      I just looked because I thought that can’t be right, and it seems like all three manufacturers (WD, Seagate and Toshiba) sell such drives https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#filter:LY49DsIwDEbv4tlCdhLSpAdAYmDqiBhCayBSaKu2IATq3UkEk_X8Pf984DyFvtt3M9RHJkXI7DSysvaEIK82PTrpmtsw_gS7NZg1z6iMq7A0LHoyFitDGjUZhV47rMj6vCD2T5mWMt5IknaJQw_1JaRZEMZwlSa-BeotZZpiK4eY4wzzKO0upkWmfPUDTL6Ue0lBEdGGAOEeXgX_vCI4zUV7hpRfBXas4LSu6xc https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#fil...
      - quectophoton 3y ago
        Huh, okay I'm facepalming now. I have no excuse. I even used PCPartPicker for this PC build but for some reason it didn't occur to me to search for possible drives there to see what other stores could have them besides my usual stores (also I avoid Amazon for anything related to computers). Thank you for removing my tunnel vision.
        justsomehnguy 3y ago
        Be warned - all SATA drives there are SMR.
linsomniac 3y ago
I know WD used to be the darling, mostly of gamers it seemed. I never REALLY trusted them because the clients we had with the WD Black drives seemed to have more failures than my beloved Ultrastar or even Deskstar (I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling). I sure was sad when I heard WD bought HGST. I had one of the Deathstar drives that I started getting I/O errors on, so I went to replace it. When I was taking it out of the system I realized it was quite hot to the touch. This was a mini tower system and I had two of the 5" bays open, so I closed them off with cardboard, left the original drive in the system and booted it back up, and it ran without errors for a couple three years after that.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling The biggest trouble with WD drives (at least pre 2015) was quality of the power. If you had a good PSU you wouldn't had a problem with WD. If you had some shit like Thermaltake... I had a case when TT PSU consistently broke RAID10, because there were too much USB devices. Replaced with a proper PSU with the same rate and everything went fine.
- paulmd 3y ago
  WD cleaned up their act after the deathstar era and Seagate repeatedly shat the bed on HDD reliability (which continues to this day, backblaze had a bunch of seagate failures again). There’s literally only 3-4 players left, HGST was bought by WD, and then there’s Toshiba, so the choices aren’t very deep. I’ve had good results with Toshiba but they’re often more expensive, and volume is a lot lower than the other players. Samsung SSDs are another darling of the gaming community that has produced a parade of defective products over the last decade. Literally since the 830 series I think there has only been one or two models without a massive firmware defect or faulty flash.
  - linsomniac 3y ago
    Deathstar was well before WD owned them I believe. I think that was post IBM, Hitachi or HGST. Isn't it funny that Backblaze finds Seagate fairly high in failures, but keeps going with them. But they are optimizing something different than I was. I was managing fairly small clusters, in the 10-150 node range. I considered it fairly expensive to have a drive failure, even if we used "remote hands" to replace the drive, we'd spend easy a couple hours on a drive failure between replacing, rebuilding, verifying, procurement and testing replacement drives. We ended up using mostly pairs of Deskstars between 2000 and 2010 when I was dealing with most of my mechanical drives. We have been using Samsung Pro and Evo 860 drives at my current job, probably have 40-50 of them, and have had good luck with them. But, I'm starting to wonder if we should rely on them based on the discussions here. We only really use them in dev and staging, production is largely Intel. I only recall one Samsung failure I've had, I had one as a ZFS log/cache drive for ~3 years and it started reporting errors.

gruez 3y ago

>It’s what happens with limited competition What do you mean? The SSD space is pretty competitive. If you go on pcpartpicker.com and search for SSDs you see dozens of brands. Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together. That's kind of why I trust and prefer Samsung (yes, despite the firmware woes) and Micron (aka Crucial) for SSDs. Kioxia too, if we're talking enterprise. They're all in the business of making the actual NAND and maybe also the controller.
- bogwog 3y ago
  So you trust the companies that have less competitors and outsized market power?
  - mlyle 3y ago
    They trust the companies that have ownership of key parts of the stack, rather than picking vendors for each piece and slapping them together. Such companies have a lot more internal expertise. Yes, it'd be nice to have more vendors like this, but you don't necessarily build a more robust industry just by having more vendors that buy NAND and a controller, make a few firmware tweaks for differentiation, and slap together a design based on an app note.
    - hakfoo 3y ago
      The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. If Samsung made flash that only worked with Samsung controllers and Samsung-exclusive PCB designs, they'd have a far smaller addressable market. I'm surprised we aren't seeing more flexibility out of the third-party market though. I could see someone saying "I'm willing to spend $100 for the most bestest possible 256Gb SSD for an industrial use case", and they'd sell you the parts that are normally sold as a 2TB MLC drive, but with a controller permalocked to using it all in psuedo-SLC cache mode, for example.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        > The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. This is ignoring that there was a market for flash before we had NVME SSD controllers, and that there still is one. NVME is a big chunk of where flash goes now, but I don't think vertical integration is going to make flash disappear in the secondary market. In any case, -- yes, it's good to have a lot of manufacturers around for the industry. But it may not be as safe of a bet to buy from those other guys. There's enough gotchas in the design and support, and there's also the whole issue of supply chains and component quality.
- jasomill 3y ago
  To Samsung's credit, they tend to fix firmware problems eventually. As such, by avoiding recently-released drives, I've had nothing but positive experiences with my fifteen or so Samsung drives, including several models that originally shipped with serious firmware bugs. While essentially obsolete at this point, I've also had excellent long-term experiences with (pre-WD) HGST SAS SSDs that use third-party (Intel) flash.
  - robotnikman 3y ago
    Same, I can vouch for them as well. I still have one thats nearly a decade old and still being used fine.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    Kingston still seems to make their own flash and controllers too. They’ve been around for a long time (since the 80s, per Wikipedia) https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industrial https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industria...
    - ciupicri 3y ago
      Let's not forget the Kingston V300 scandal [1]: > The first generation V300 (which was sampled to media) used Toshiba's 19nm Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND but some time ago Kingston silently switched to Micron's 20nm asynchronous NAND. The difference between the two is that the Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface in the Toshiba NAND is good for up to 200MB/s, whereas the asynchronous interface is usually good for only ~50MB/s. The reason I say usually is that Kingston wasn't willing to go into details about the speed of the asynchronous NAND they use and the ONFI spec doesn't list maximum bandwidth for the single data rate (i.e. asynchronous) NAND. However, even though we lack the specifics of the asynchronous NAND, it's certain that we are dealing with slower NAND here and Kingston admitted that the Micron NAND isn't capable of the same performance as the older Toshiba NAND. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ss...
    - gruez 3y ago
- ciupicri 3y ago
  Has Samsung replaced the SSDs with little life left because of their broken firmware?
loeg 3y ago
The HDD space has fewer vendors (especially in the consumer space).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- quectophoton 3y ago
  It certainly seems that way. Earlier this year I was looking for internal 2.5" HDDs with more than 1TB of capacity, and I could only find Seagate drives. I try to always buy from different vendors, but in this case I had no choice but to buy 2 drives of the same model.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    I just looked because I thought that can’t be right, and it seems like all three manufacturers (WD, Seagate and Toshiba) sell such drives https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#filter:LY49DsIwDEbv4tlCdhLSpAdAYmDqiBhCayBSaKu2IATq3UkEk_X8Pf984DyFvtt3M9RHJkXI7DSysvaEIK82PTrpmtsw_gS7NZg1z6iMq7A0LHoyFitDGjUZhV47rMj6vCD2T5mWMt5IknaJQw_1JaRZEMZwlSa-BeotZZpiK4eY4wzzKO0upkWmfPUDTL6Ue0lBEdGGAOEeXgX_vCI4zUV7hpRfBXas4LSu6xc https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#fil...
    - quectophoton 3y ago
      Huh, okay I'm facepalming now. I have no excuse. I even used PCPartPicker for this PC build but for some reason it didn't occur to me to search for possible drives there to see what other stores could have them besides my usual stores (also I avoid Amazon for anything related to computers). Thank you for removing my tunnel vision.
      - justsomehnguy 3y ago
        Be warned - all SATA drives there are SMR.

linsomniac 3y ago

I know WD used to be the darling, mostly of gamers it seemed. I never REALLY trusted them because the clients we had with the WD Black drives seemed to have more failures than my beloved Ultrastar or even Deskstar (I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling). I sure was sad when I heard WD bought HGST. I had one of the Deathstar drives that I started getting I/O errors on, so I went to replace it. When I was taking it out of the system I realized it was quite hot to the touch. This was a mini tower system and I had two of the 5" bays open, so I closed them off with cardboard, left the original drive in the system and booted it back up, and it ran without errors for a couple three years after that.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling The biggest trouble with WD drives (at least pre 2015) was quality of the power. If you had a good PSU you wouldn't had a problem with WD. If you had some shit like Thermaltake... I had a case when TT PSU consistently broke RAID10, because there were too much USB devices. Replaced with a proper PSU with the same rate and everything went fine.
paulmd 3y ago
WD cleaned up their act after the deathstar era and Seagate repeatedly shat the bed on HDD reliability (which continues to this day, backblaze had a bunch of seagate failures again). There’s literally only 3-4 players left, HGST was bought by WD, and then there’s Toshiba, so the choices aren’t very deep. I’ve had good results with Toshiba but they’re often more expensive, and volume is a lot lower than the other players. Samsung SSDs are another darling of the gaming community that has produced a parade of defective products over the last decade. Literally since the 830 series I think there has only been one or two models without a massive firmware defect or faulty flash.
- linsomniac 3y ago
  Deathstar was well before WD owned them I believe. I think that was post IBM, Hitachi or HGST. Isn't it funny that Backblaze finds Seagate fairly high in failures, but keeps going with them. But they are optimizing something different than I was. I was managing fairly small clusters, in the 10-150 node range. I considered it fairly expensive to have a drive failure, even if we used "remote hands" to replace the drive, we'd spend easy a couple hours on a drive failure between replacing, rebuilding, verifying, procurement and testing replacement drives. We ended up using mostly pairs of Deskstars between 2000 and 2010 when I was dealing with most of my mechanical drives. We have been using Samsung Pro and Evo 860 drives at my current job, probably have 40-50 of them, and have had good luck with them. But, I'm starting to wonder if we should rely on them based on the discussions here. We only really use them in dev and staging, production is largely Intel. I only recall one Samsung failure I've had, I had one as a ZFS log/cache drive for ~3 years and it started reporting errors.