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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

I had an Intel 6000-series 1/2 TB NVMe. After just 2 years of light, fitful use in my laptop, my BIOS warned me it was about to fail. I spent the night doing backups, and it totally failed the next day. I count myself lucky, but I did not replace it with an Intel product.

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That was kind of a trashy product. Intel doesn't take their client/consumer SSD business very seriously these days, and that was only halfway an Intel SSD. The controller was Silicon Motion's first NVMe SSD controller, the drive had numerous firmware bugs, and it was probably also a bit of a dumping grounds for low-grade flash from Intel's first generation of 3D NAND. The successor to that drive switched from three bit per cell TLC NAND to four bit per cell QLC NAND and still managed to be a superior product in almost every way because the updated controller and firmware were so much more mature.

Thank you for the clue. All the reviews I had read claimed Intel and Samsung SSEs were bulletproof, and everybody else's were trash.

For $300, it should have been a better product. Only 6 months later the competition was getting only $100 for them.

Intel used to have good SSDs, but they seem to have given up on the consumer market. Samsung and Crucial are the only ones I'd trust today, based on my experience.

Although looking at Samsung's smartphones and laptops, they might be skimping on quality, as well :/

Samsung Flash storage I have always had great success with

Intel I would only use Enterprise Class gear, and even then would look to other vendors for storage

Intel trades off their name, and puts out alot of crap at the lower end which they get away with because "No one ever got fired for buying intel"

Alot of these big names do this....

It's funny to see Intel tracing IBM's steps. It's tempting to think they sick of being successful. I think the real answer is ignorance of IBM/Compaq, lack of wisdom, and, the key ingredient: hubris.

Seconding Samsung. I've only had good experiences with them in the past few years.

Sad. I have a 9yr old Intel ssd that still benchmarks like new.

Was it NVMe though? The standard is only 9 years old, so that's an impressive lifespan for one of the first drives.

No, it was SATA SSD.

Sadly, I don't think it's even possible to buy consumer SLC drives these days.

'Consumer product' is a synonym for 'cheaply built crap sold at premium prices' these days.

Much as how the introduction of SMR allowed for the prices of real hard drives to increase by 25% or more, the development of new data-destroying technologies for consumer SSDs has pushed the effective price for non-garbage SSD storage up to the $0.75-$1 USD per GB level of enterprise SSDs.

That is ridiculously inaccurate. Consumer SSDs that are absolute overkill on performance and endurance are only half the price of the $0.75 per GB you claim as a price floor for good drives. Realistically, there's no reason for a consumer to spend even 20¢/GB, and there are tons of good drives well below that price which will not eat your data and will outlast the useful lifetime of several other components in your machine. There are reputable, well-behaved SATA SSDs at 10¢/GB.

The entire point of this post is that consumer SSDs provide no data loss protection in the event of an unexpected hard reset or power loss. Data security is only available in far more costly enterprise SSDs.

You've missed out on the substance of the discussion too, then.

Expensive enterprise SSDs make crash-proof data protection automatic. Consumer SSDs require the host system's software to explicitly flush the write cache when necessary. This tradeoff works extremely well in practice, and consumer SSDs don't have serious data loss problems for consumer workloads. Enterprise workloads that are much more paranoid about syncing every single transaction cannot safely use consumer SSDs without unacceptable performance loss, but that certainly doesn't mean that consumer SSDs are playing fast and loose with your data safety.

At some point in my company we've bought quite a lot of Intel SSD, and many failed after a relatively light use. We're using Samsung ones, and they're obviously much more reliable.

That's a bummer. I have an Intel 700 series I got several years ago that I've been torturing on and off for years. Still no problems. I think it was their first NVMe/PCIe drive too. Hell, the haswell era i7 and the god-knows-when era quadro feel much more "long in the tooth".

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