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Interestingly Framework (the laptop company) ships exclusively WD SSDs, although I suppose you can bring your own SSD if you really want. Though I wonder which

Interestingly Framework (the laptop company) ships exclusively WD SSDs, although I suppose you can bring your own SSD if you really want. Though I wonder which other brands are trustable? Just yesterday I read a comment on another thread mentioning how Samsung’s firmware is subpar (which, having owned several other Samsung products, doesn’t surprise me).

wtallis 3y ago
The solution is to give up on the entire idea of brand loyalty. These are commodity products. None of the products or companies are 100% reliable. To some extent, you get what you pay for, but paying more won't guarantee a trouble-free experience. When some brands command a premium price in the market, across their entire product line, that's really just a sign that they've managed to get customers to think their products are special. But everyone has shipped some lemons, and everyone has screwed over somebody with bad customer support.
- frognumber 3y ago
  No, I don't think so. Off-brands are hyper-unreliable. There is a stack of chips for reliability, ranked from 100% working, to ones which e.g. have half disabled, or ECC+scrambler. On-brands at least /try/ to be reliable. Off-brands don't. WD/Sandisk is a little weird, in that they went from on-brand to off-brand. I also haven't seen many lemons from Crucial. They control the process end-to-end, and don't really go for bleeding-edge performance or rock-bottom price. For me, they've always been good and reliable for both memory and flash. Kingston, Lexar, and Sandisk were premium brands which really tried to be reliable, until WD bough Sandisk. Samsung cares about reputation too, but pushes performance a bit more, so you sometimes get lemons. But on the whole, they at least try.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    I wouldn’t really consider WD an off-brand. Off-brands to me are the cheapie no-name brands from China.
    - philistine 3y ago
      Colloquially, those are the six-letter brands. https://archive.is/NNfO3 https://archive.is/NNfO3
    - frognumber 3y ago
      I would definitely consider WD an off-brand at this point. It's not about the size of the company. Many small, boutique brands are excellent. By revenue, Walmart is the largest company in the world, but no one praises them for their commitment to quality. Indeed, the stores I trust most are small family-run shops where the proprietor has been running them for decades. I also no longer consider Chinese brands to necessarily be off-brands. China has some excellent brands too these days.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    > Off-brands are hyper-unreliable. There is a stack of chips for reliability, ranked from 100% working, to ones which e.g. have half disabled, or ECC+scrambler. Nah, that's not at all accurate. There are tons of small brands that have both dirt-cheap drives built using whatever components are cheap that week, and more expensive products using high-grade current-generation flash and controllers. Kingston and Lexar brands operate that way, too, with a mix of cheap crap and more expensive products with quality components (often overpriced). And some of the small brands don't really do bottom-of-the-barrel drives at all (eg. Corsair, Sabrent). And certainly Crucial/Micron have had their fair share of serious SSD issues. Brand just isn't the reliable indicator of quality that you and many other consumers wish it was.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    No. Some of the best brands are the ones you’ve never heard of like innogrit and phison, because they’re the ones making the chips everyone else uses. Most companies are just building out reference designs from one of these handful of companies and the quality is completely identical. And the ones who aren’t, like Samsung, are notorious for even worse reliablity. The situation is completely reversed from 10 years ago, these are commodity products now and the people who use the reference design do better than the ones who go their own way, like Samsung. Samsung’s reliability has been worse than a random small brand like innogrit or Sabrent in the modern era, 100%.
frognumber 3y ago
Crucial is my go-to brand for reliability at reasonable prices. Otherwise: * Kingston has an excellent reputation for reliability, as does Lexar, but you often pay a premium. * Samsung and Intel are considered good, but they do occasionally make specific subpar models. Crucial is my go-to, thought. I also buy direct to avoid knock-offs. Buying premium brands from eBay or Amazon especially makes no sense, since knock-offs are so !@#$% common.
- ciupicri 3y ago
  Lexar was bought by the Chinese company Longsys. Kingston has a reputation for bait and switch as in the V300 scandal (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...).
  - frognumber 3y ago
    Did that result in a decline in Lexar quality? It's a serious question. - Many Chinese firms bought established brand names in order to milk a cash cow and sell junk at premium prices. - Many others did so with very good products, and seem to be doing a nice job sustaining those brands and are investing in this long-term. I don't know what happened here. ThinkPads don't seem any worse under Lenovo than late IBM, and GE Appliances, if anything, went up in quality.
    - ciupicri 3y ago
      I bought an SD card for someone a couple of years ago and he had no issues, but I can't remember if it was after the acquisition or before.
- Smoosh 3y ago
  Kingston were being anti-consumer around 10 years ago. I don’t know if they have improved their practices since then. 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...
mceachen 3y ago
SK Hynix is an OEM supplier for a bunch of brands, and seems to have good ratings across several different e-tailers. As for anecdata, I chew through SSDs due to high disk I/O loads from running continuous integration test suites for PhotoStructure on a bunch of different test rigs. I've had several WD and Samsung SSDs fail, but have yet to kill one of my 10+ SK Hynix sticks. The best solution, of course, is to have automated backups in place, so drive failure is only a minor inconvenience, not a tragedy.
- j-bos 3y ago
  Where do you buy SK Hynix from?

wtallis 3y ago

The solution is to give up on the entire idea of brand loyalty. These are commodity products. None of the products or companies are 100% reliable. To some extent, you get what you pay for, but paying more won't guarantee a trouble-free experience. When some brands command a premium price in the market, across their entire product line, that's really just a sign that they've managed to get customers to think their products are special. But everyone has shipped some lemons, and everyone has screwed over somebody with bad customer support.

frognumber 3y ago
No, I don't think so. Off-brands are hyper-unreliable. There is a stack of chips for reliability, ranked from 100% working, to ones which e.g. have half disabled, or ECC+scrambler. On-brands at least /try/ to be reliable. Off-brands don't. WD/Sandisk is a little weird, in that they went from on-brand to off-brand. I also haven't seen many lemons from Crucial. They control the process end-to-end, and don't really go for bleeding-edge performance or rock-bottom price. For me, they've always been good and reliable for both memory and flash. Kingston, Lexar, and Sandisk were premium brands which really tried to be reliable, until WD bough Sandisk. Samsung cares about reputation too, but pushes performance a bit more, so you sometimes get lemons. But on the whole, they at least try.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  I wouldn’t really consider WD an off-brand. Off-brands to me are the cheapie no-name brands from China.
  - philistine 3y ago
    Colloquially, those are the six-letter brands. https://archive.is/NNfO3 https://archive.is/NNfO3
  - frognumber 3y ago
    I would definitely consider WD an off-brand at this point. It's not about the size of the company. Many small, boutique brands are excellent. By revenue, Walmart is the largest company in the world, but no one praises them for their commitment to quality. Indeed, the stores I trust most are small family-run shops where the proprietor has been running them for decades. I also no longer consider Chinese brands to necessarily be off-brands. China has some excellent brands too these days.
- wtallis 3y ago
  > Off-brands are hyper-unreliable. There is a stack of chips for reliability, ranked from 100% working, to ones which e.g. have half disabled, or ECC+scrambler. Nah, that's not at all accurate. There are tons of small brands that have both dirt-cheap drives built using whatever components are cheap that week, and more expensive products using high-grade current-generation flash and controllers. Kingston and Lexar brands operate that way, too, with a mix of cheap crap and more expensive products with quality components (often overpriced). And some of the small brands don't really do bottom-of-the-barrel drives at all (eg. Corsair, Sabrent). And certainly Crucial/Micron have had their fair share of serious SSD issues. Brand just isn't the reliable indicator of quality that you and many other consumers wish it was.
- paulmd 3y ago
  No. Some of the best brands are the ones you’ve never heard of like innogrit and phison, because they’re the ones making the chips everyone else uses. Most companies are just building out reference designs from one of these handful of companies and the quality is completely identical. And the ones who aren’t, like Samsung, are notorious for even worse reliablity. The situation is completely reversed from 10 years ago, these are commodity products now and the people who use the reference design do better than the ones who go their own way, like Samsung. Samsung’s reliability has been worse than a random small brand like innogrit or Sabrent in the modern era, 100%.

frognumber 3y ago

Crucial is my go-to brand for reliability at reasonable prices. Otherwise: * Kingston has an excellent reputation for reliability, as does Lexar, but you often pay a premium. * Samsung and Intel are considered good, but they do occasionally make specific subpar models. Crucial is my go-to, thought. I also buy direct to avoid knock-offs. Buying premium brands from eBay or Amazon especially makes no sense, since knock-offs are so !@#$% common.

ciupicri 3y ago
Lexar was bought by the Chinese company Longsys. Kingston has a reputation for bait and switch as in the V300 scandal (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...).
- frognumber 3y ago
  Did that result in a decline in Lexar quality? It's a serious question. - Many Chinese firms bought established brand names in order to milk a cash cow and sell junk at premium prices. - Many others did so with very good products, and seem to be doing a nice job sustaining those brands and are investing in this long-term. I don't know what happened here. ThinkPads don't seem any worse under Lenovo than late IBM, and GE Appliances, if anything, went up in quality.
  - ciupicri 3y ago
    I bought an SD card for someone a couple of years ago and he had no issues, but I can't remember if it was after the acquisition or before.
Smoosh 3y ago
Kingston were being anti-consumer around 10 years ago. I don’t know if they have improved their practices since then. 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...

mceachen 3y ago

SK Hynix is an OEM supplier for a bunch of brands, and seems to have good ratings across several different e-tailers. As for anecdata, I chew through SSDs due to high disk I/O loads from running continuous integration test suites for PhotoStructure on a bunch of different test rigs. I've had several WD and Samsung SSDs fail, but have yet to kill one of my 10+ SK Hynix sticks. The best solution, of course, is to have automated backups in place, so drive failure is only a minor inconvenience, not a tragedy.

j-bos 3y ago
Where do you buy SK Hynix from?