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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

I will never waste money on a Sandisk SSD again. My last one stopped working out of nowhere. Much happier with my Crucial X10.

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There is no brand that never produced a SSD with a fault. I had tried all major HDD/SSD brands, and I think every single of them failed at some point.

What is important is how they handle that. I had a faulty Sandisk and it was replaced with a working one without any problem or unnecessary question. Some other brands annoy you with stupid questions, puzzles and other tricks trying to avoid doing a replacement. And some just ignore any requests (ex. Samsung, from my experience) to replace a faulty SSD.

I've never had a problem with Intel, but they sold that business recently.

they had a whole series that would irretrievably die after 1700 idle hours due to a firmware bug.

This summer I bought two Intel 2TB nvme drives for $65 each. Not the newest tech but I've also never had a problem with an Intel SSD. I still have my original 40GB from 2012 in an old laptop and it works just like new.

The company that bought their SSD division (Solidigm) supports the Intel branded drives, and their utility had firmware updates ready to go for the ones I bought.

I'd probably buy a Solidigm if I needed a new drive and these firesale Intel drives are gone.

It's the Koreans - SK Hynix bought it and is using it as their consumer drive division. The P44 Pro is supposed to be a more reliable and cheaper competitor to the Samsung 990 pro...but that unit is also not doing so hot w/ the memory downturn/post-covid correction

> Not the newest tech but I've also never had a problem with an Intel SSD.

I used to run Intel (enterprise) SSDs in servers. I didn't run enough other SSDs to have a sense for whether the failure rate was abnormally high, but it was definitely not zero (it was significantly less than the enterprise hard drives we were running). And the failure mechanism was sudden disappearance from the bus.

My message to you is not to avoid Intel SSDs, just to make sure you have a backup in place, because when they fail, my experience is there's no warning, they just disappear. This seems to be the common failure mode for all/most SSDs, even though they're supposed to fail read-only. Hard drives usually give warnings as they fail, but not always enough warning to rescue data.

Lets not forget killing the drive instead of going read only, and later lying about this being intended outcome despite opposite statements in official documentation.

https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

"After a reboot, the SSD disappeared completely from the Intel software. It was still detected by the storage driver, but only as an inaccessible, 0GB SATA device.

According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally matches what’s supposed to happen. The write errors suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive."

> and I think every single of them failed at some point.

I understand that you probably are alluding to the fact that you never scientifically measured this experiment and that this is anecdotal. But this is pretty loose verbiage when we're talking about a product that is guaranteed to fail at some point or another. These are a wear item.

Oh, yes, you're right, it's more like anecdotal experience. I didn't specify that, but I actually meant the time period when I don't expect them to break, which is about a year after the purchase. The device is still under warranty so I'm saying that some brands make it easy to replace it, some do the opposite.

On the contrary, my Sandisk SSD I got around (roughly) 6 years ago is still happily working, despite being utilised for a lot of writing. It's gone through 3 house moves, and it's still going strong -- what a great purchase.

My 2 Crucial MX500 SSDs have been pretty solid too; nothing bad to report on them.

Re: your SSD, did you RMA it?

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