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>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 f

>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?

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?