Just had a third well reviewed Seagate Nytro Enterprise SSD fail after a very short period of use, very low write volume. Starting to wonder whats up with Seagate.
Maybe SSD are more prone to failures. I had a Samsung 980 Pro which died after a couple of months. Recently bought a SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD and it started to corrupt data just after a couple of weeks of use.
Nowadays most SSD failures happen in the SSD controller, not in the physical storage. I wouldn't trust SSD manufacturers to write reliable software. At least not without waiting 3 years to weed out the obviously bad brands.
For what it's worth, I have both a SATA-based Samsung portable SSD and a NVMe-based SanDisk portable SSD, and they've both been almost completely trouble-free for me—though I am careful in how I use them. I'm definitely not the disgruntled customer you seem to think I am (especially because both of those drives were review samples).
For the smaller USB-native flash drives, I have not noticed any particular pattern to their unreliability, but I trust them even less because that product segment is a dumping grounds for low-grade flash memory.
For NVMe-based portable SSDs in particular, I am wary in part because of the long-running thread on the AnandTech forums documenting how all three suppliers of NVMe to USB bridge chips (JMicron, Realtek, ASMedia) have had extensive problems with both reliability and compatibility. Companies like Samsung and SanDisk can certainly be expected to do more QA on their products incorporating those chips than smaller brands, but that's not a guarantee that they'll avoid the problems from their upstream supplier.
tl;dr: All 3 of my Samsung M.2 NVMe SSDs have failed in less than 3 years. 100% failure rate.
My first SSD was a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO. It failed after 2 years and 8 months. It was replaced under warranty with a 1TB 970 EVO Plus.
That replacement has now also failed after 1 year and 9 months.
I bought a 2nd 1TB 970 EVO Plus in May 2019. It has now also failed (2 years and 7 months).
Both are expected to be replaced under warranty.
The 2 970 EVO Plus SSDs clearly had hardware errors (that were not accurately reflected in SMART data) that caused everything from system hangs, game crashes to file corruption on OTHER drives. I couldn't believe it at first but after 5 days of testing and trial and error, I had it confirmed. As soon as I removed those SSDs, my PC was completely stable again.
In the meantime, I have bought a Kingston KC3000 1TB drive as I no longer trust Samsung M.2 NVMe SSDs. On the other hand, I have a Samsung EVO 850 SATA drive which has been rock-solid.
Not my experience lately with Seagate Nytro Enterprise SSD's, had a few of them fail completely within the first few months of use. No warning just disappeared and no longer recognized on the bus.
I've owned 5 SSD's over the past 3 years. 2 OCZ, 2 crucial, 1 intel. Both OCZs failed, one after a month the other after 9 months. The oldest, a 3 year old crucial is still working fine.
All SSDs were from the same batch and had the same amount of writes on them and all failed in a very small window. It's a known issue with consumer drives.
I've also had both SandForce and Intel (310, 320, 520, and 710!) SSDs fail -- the issue is not running out of cycles (which could be predicted, or mitigated by buying more Enterprise style SSDs), but rather weird controller errors.
One (milli-)second the drive is totally fine, then the next it is just gone. Magnetic disks usually give some warning, and usually fail for mechanical vs. controller reasons.
I still use SSDs, but am constantly wary, especially in the first month of a new drive's service.
In 2021 I bought at least ten 870 EVO 4 TB SATA and six 980 Pro 2 TB NVMe. All devices failed within 6 months on barely used systems. Find some smart data here:
The pattern is always the same: I have them configured in a raid 1. Once a month debian does a raid check. During the raid check Debian reads all data from both devices. I get uncorrectable read errors. I no longer use Samsung SSDs and replaced them them with SSDSC2KB076T8, Micron SSDs and KC3000 Kingston NVMes. No failures since then. In 2021 I told a friend of mine about the issue. He also had a 870 EVO, issued a dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=8M and guess what, he got uncorrectable read errors. Due to running them in RAID 1 I caught the issue early and I had no data loss or downtime because the Linux software raid compensated for the bad hardware. However I replaced them in a hurry because I no longer trust Samsung SSDs. As you can see from the smart log they're barely used. Less than 4 months in service and 10 TB written. I also got uncorrectable read errors when evacuating data from the devices.
Is that a Crucial M4? I had mine replaced 3 times due to sector corruption as well, and then trashed it. It also had a bug where it would break after ~5200 hours of use.
OTOH, I never had an issue with my Intel or Samsung SSDs, even with heavier use.
I agree with you that reliability is key, and it bugs me that reviews still mostly look at speed and price.
Could be a bad chip batch on the SSD. 3rd party SSD vendors are notorious for switching around NAND suppliers. Often they are forced to do so(since they do not control the supply like Samsung/Micron/Intel does)
Besides SP600 is not considered a particularly good SSD
Pretty much all SATA3 SSDs claim the top speed of 500MB+ read/ 300MB+ write which is a best case scenario.
Many lesser SSDs have problems in random read writes.
One went into read only mode, and I could copy all the data to a replacement drive (I think - it's possible there's corruption in files I haven't noticed).
Recently one I bought in 2016 failed hard. Was working fine one day, next reboot the machine didn't even recognise it had the drive plugged in. (I also didn't lose any data, because I don't trust _any_ drives, and have multiple backups of it...)
The puts me at a 66% failure rate over ~5 years for SSDs in my personal machines. I don't recall a spinning rust drive failing in that time, and I have quite a lot more of those in service.
This is really rather shocking to me. I always figured SSDs were as reliable as SD cards or other Flash based items like MP3 players or phones. Where you practically never see a failure due to the memory going bad.
Storage (from well known brands) used to be the most reliable component. Not sure what is going on, but feels like quality control is not as good.
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