SSD (Sata III) recommendations or brands to avoid?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
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I have them all

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Just to add my response but I wonā€™t go technical since the comments have already done well in that regard.

But all my SSDs are Samsung, currently have 7 of them (Not including 2 external Samsungs) in my system across different model versions so around 10TB of storage together, only one is NVME though, the rest are Sata 3.

My oldest drive in my system is from 2019 and still works fine, although over time I mostly put stuff on it that doesnā€™t do many writes such as storing videos on it (Not editing videos), It has a 18186 hours power on time but still healthy status. So I have found Samsungs to be reliable with the ones I have.

However usually many companies have good product lines and bad ones rather than the entire company being bad but since I havenā€™t used other manufacturers except for 1 crucial SSD (Even older from 2018 that still works but unused for few years) so I cannot say anything for those other than looking up data of them online. The main brand I would avoid (for cheaper lower end Sata 3) is Kingston, we ordered 100-120 of these in my company and must have had at least 20 of them develop the same flaw where they were undetected in BIOS randomly, and even had 5+ of them arrive dead on arrival out of the package.

One thing to mention is I wouldnā€™t use Samsung QVO drives as these will not last as long as Evo drives since they use QLC memory rather than TLC (Or rather make sure itā€™s at least TLC with any manufacturer), although Samsung uses their own unique naming scheme of 4bit MLC for QLC and 3bit MLC for TLC. All the ones I own are Evo drives but Pro ones (if this still exists for Sata drives) should last even longer.

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I went out of my way to phrase my questions so no company as a whole gets maligned in any way. Just, as you pointed out, oneā€™s preference or avoidance of one thing they sell, so itā€™s been a great thread that way for me as a learner.

Just as unanimous most were about what to avoid, same they were what to buy. Which is great for me.

I secretly wonder if a single physical brick and mortar plant manufacturers the same SSD for three brands or more, and we are none the wiser.

As an SSD noon Crucial was my first and only exposure and I canā€™t say Iā€™m unhappy at all.

Thanks for even mentioning the SSD as storage as well.

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I think with Samsung they manufacture their own controllers and memory modules and circuit boards in-house so everything in their SSDs are mostly made by them and have full control of the process. I think Intel, Toshiba, and more recently Western Digital also make their own controllers too from acquiring Sandisk.

With various other SSD brands however, they can have memory modules from one manufacturer, and then buy the controllers from another. Which is where the variance of whether an SSD model is good or not is sometimes it depends on the parts put inside them. But there is a chance multiple SSD brands are using the same good parts and fairly comparable.

While I havenā€™t looked in to it I know multiple brands can be owned by the same parent company, Sandisk is owned by Western Digital, and Western Digital also have a line of SSDs under their brand so I wouldnā€™t be surprised if both these brands have the same or similar parts with a different outer case.

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If you need some detailed informations to compare models & make, you may look at this link.
Itā€™s german only, but the technical details should be clear.
Here you get infos for TLC vs QLC or whatever. I think TLC is really important.

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Sure, but they were times some company had lots of HDD failure, if it happens with SSD in the future, thereā€™s nothing wrong talking about it.

I had a chinese brand SSD (Kingdian) which had bad performances because it used old technology, but was still much faster and silent than a HDD. It was supposed to be temporary, but I used it for 5 years and surprisingly had no issue.

I only have one SSD (500GB WD Blue) for the system, I still use HDD for data, Iā€™ll wait for the prices to go down for 4TB or more.

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Crucial MX500 is a good one SSD , i have one 2280 nvme SATA , and 4 MX500 S-ATA since 2016 (512Go) , no trouble.be careful price are rising theses days for data AI

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