In my view, I do think Samsung’s hardware is generally more reliable, however this gets negated by their dogshit firmware. I’ve had multiple different samsung enterprise and oem drives die because their firmware is full of bugs.

Basically one will suddenly decide it hates life and will then only show up as having only 1gb of space and the firmware version set as “ERRORMOD” (“error mode”). This is not a time counter rollover issue as far as I can tell (though samsung has plenty of those too [0]) as there wasn’t anything in my smart logging that would indicate a time value they approached and died. Samsung’s firmware is just super buggy and can get caught in a bad state. You can find business purchasers complaining about these issues as well. [1]

Someone once decompiled the firmware of the EVO 840 before they started encrypting it. Have a look at the “Bugs” section to have a laugh: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf

So when you see a samsung enterprise/oem drive on ebay with 99% of it’s life left, what you are really buying is a drive with bugs but no way to obtain fixes, since samsung will give you the business version of go fuck yourself by telling you to “contact your vendor”.

Part of the problem is samsung cultivates a complete shitshow where vendors will “customize” firmware, so an identical drive from lenovo will need different firmware than one from HP. The other part of the problem is Samsung’s consumer drive branch is basically completely separate from their oem/enterprise branch despite what is mostly the same hardware and firmware. So while the consumer branch has historically had to eventually face the market consequences of gross negligence, the enterprise branch is shielded by misdirection to the vendors.

Fortunately mine where quite cheap so not much loss, but still, they lost any illusion of competence over other companies in my eyes.

Note there is a collection of samsung firmware here, though it is hardly complete: https://github.com/lolyinseo/samsung-nvme-firmware

P.S. Also note there is a poorly documented but common form of ssd “failure” that can happen. If you have a drive suddenly not show up on next boot (especially after power loss), using the power cycling technique can often recover a drive: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-dro...

[1]: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/pm9a3-firm...