I got a stark reminder of that last week. Picked up a cheap SSD on Amazon because I was impatient and in a hurry, not paying the attention that I should have.
Long story short: it lasted a week and took the bios out with it. My own fault and the laptop wasn’t particularly important, but it still irritates me that such crap is on the market.
Looking after the fact, the Leven brand has a very pretty, but uninformative and poorly translated Taiwanese website. Would have been my first clue…
In fact it’s 90% of all SSD market, including ‘major’ companies…
Absolute crap apart from some models of Samsung and Intel.
Any ideas about WD Blue SATA SSD’s? I can get one cheap,or is it better to get a Samsung EVO. I know they’re OK because I have one in another machine.
Definitely Samsung, coz WD are not really what you’d expect of WD in HDD world (they’ve bought SanDisk which are the average quality USB sticks / memory cards to start on SSD market) so unfortunately not top quality stuff in there.
Thanks for the info, that makes sense. I’ve never thought much of SanDisk, although WD have always been my goto when it comes to HDD’s, they have never let me down where others have, and keep, failing. I’ll spend a bit more and get an EVO. 
Same here, not all models are equal in quality though 
Yeah, it’s well worth reading through the different types. Not just for the intended usage but for quality control. I always buy the Black ones for critical things because they are specified for enterprise use and quality control is tighter on them.
Indeed, Blacks are very good models, although too noisy for my home use 
Lately i prefer Purple 5400 rpm models, like WD Purple WD40PURZ - they’re extremely reliable coz they’re made for 24/7 multi-threaded read / write (surveillance), but also absolutely silent and still effectively (actual mb/s) faster than most other brands 7200 rpm on a market currently…
Absolutely love those, can’t recommend enough 
I was unaware of those, been awhile since last purchase! I’ll check 'em out! The Blacks are a bit noisy I agree.
Blue SATA SSD’s are ok. Nowadays, most SATA from 1st or 2nd tier manufacturers are pretty close to identical in performance because the bus is the limiting factor, not the hardware. The latest and greatest technology no longer benefits SATA SSD’s because controllers and NAND LONG ago surpassed the transfer speed of SATA.
Now, Blue NVMe I actually like (for the price). They’re not AMAZING performance, but they’re VERY consistent, really needing to BASH on them to hit the write hole, single sided (good for laptops), have GREAT idle power usage (good for laptops), and the performance is still totally adequate, while being one of the least expensive NVMe drives avaialble.
Yeah, the only reason I’m considering SATA for this machine is that it’s a very old motherboard and it will only work with SATA. The step up in speed from HDD is still worth it. If I do a complete rebuild I’ll buy a new mobo but until then I’ll optimize what I have.
Agree, any type of SSD will show day and night performance difference compared to HDD. I’ve been using SATA SSD for a long time before NVME was a thing, and for quite a while I kept grinning every time I turned on the PC. The difference was incredible.
It looks like I’ll get used to it eventually. Typing speed is increasing slowly. As for the switches, I went with Cherry MX silent red switches, I want to use it at work as well when I get more used to it.
Panasonic SC-AKX320
mine has Gateron pinks… also a very smooth linear switch… although not necessarily very silent…
although if I’m honest I still prefer my clicky blue switches
What speed do you get out of them there?
I have some of them here:
But they are a bit expensive unfortunately.
This little guy. Looks much better live than the picture on the box. Super easy to set up. And seems FAST. No need to get fiber now.
I used Gnome Disks to bench mark a SanDisk Extreme Pro 128 GB formatted with ext4:
For the SanDisk Extreme Pro shown in the above picture, it was right at the listed Read Rate of 420 MB/s but actual write rate in my instance was a little lower than the listed 380 MB/s at 217.5 MB/s.
For what it is worth.
Pudge
I have brown switches in my other keyboard and they do sound way better to me… Not as much to my colleages. 
