> 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.

> 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.