3 ms·

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 disable

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%.

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%.