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Comment by RDaneel0livaw | Hacker News Reader

I'm astonished that after WD bought the SanDisk brand they kept it alive. You couldn't pay ME to use anything under that name, it's so negative. Maybe now with this critical failure they'll just slowly start branding things with any of the other myriad of brand names they've bought "hgst" for instance and slowly kill the brand.

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What's wrong with SanDisk? Out of the loop here -- I had a SanDisk SSD around 5 years ago and it was absolutely great; it's still going today (it's seen quite a bit of use, too.)

Yeah, kinda no clue what the controversy is cuz I've never had any SanDisk drive fail. Only WD :)

I've very rarely had an SSD fail in general, to be honest -- though I do generally stick to reliable brands[0], not "Xykdidlwo" or "Dyewkdlo" off Amazon.

Right now I've got 3 SSDs in my server (2 mirrored so 1TB for apps, and a 500GB boot drive), and I'm interested to see which one goes first.

[0]: Crucial, Samsung, Kingston, SanDisk (until I hear any information which discourages me) etc.

Yes, at least in terms of their memory cards for cameras etc. I’ve really only heard them as being quite well regarded, as far as I can remember…

SanDisk used to have a good reputation, but after being acquired by WD they've turned to shit:

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sandisk-extreme-ssds...

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-wester...

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sandisk-extreme-ssds...

I don't have any experience with their ssd's but I have a few sandisk usb drives that have lasted far longer than any other brand in that hellish environment of being an os system drive. It is not really that bad but with the frequency that usb flash dies when used as a boot drive you would thing I am abusing them. The no-names I understand, junk from who knows where. but the worst offender was kingston, they are probably fine on windows as a rarely used backup unit. but as an openbsd system drive, hot garbage, I went through 6 in six months, I would expect better from a named brand. as a comparison I am still on the original sandisk units, 5 years and counting.

Of the brands I’ve run across for SD cards, Sandisk has been top 3ish for quality. I’ve never had major issues at least for SD Cards?

Samsung has been catching up though.

What brand would you trust the most, for SSDs and for SD cards?

There's only four flash manufacturers: Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix and SanDisk/Kioxia. All of them have had problems over the years. All of them will change the internals of products without changing SKUs or anything visible to the consumer.

You best bet is:

- Buy a variety of manufacturers and SKUs

- Create backups regularly and test your restores

Also, always run perf tests (especially using large writes - preferably up to the capacity of the drive!) for any drive that it is important 'you got what you paid for'.

The number of counterfeit, badly designed to the point of defective, or DOA SD Cards and SSD drives I've seen over the last few years is crazy.

I literally won't even buy USB sticks anymore. The last time I tried, all 5 different makes/models I tried were so dysfunctional they were useless. Literally unfit for purpose. Major brands too!

Did you buy in person, or in an online marketplace (ex. Amazon)? I only buy thumb drives at physical stores to try and avoid outright counterfeits.

Both.

A lot (all?) recent USB sticks have terrible thermal design, and will throttle seemingly arbitrarily to very low speeds under sustained load. Like 2.5MB/s type speeds. They seem like they were made to to theoretically exist for the market niche, but no one expected them to actually be used by anyone who paid any attention at all.

Same for ones bought in big box stores as Amazon or the like. Name brand or random brand.

A lot of less expensive 2.5+ Gig Ethernet dongles do the same.

Good performance for 5-10 seconds, then abysmal.

I switched to SD cards, and at least the good brands of those had decent and predictable performance (50-75MB/s sustained for the same price point). They were also a lot cheaper in general for the capacity.

There is also YMTC https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro...

WD bought HGST? HGST are supposed to be far and away the most reliable source of drives iir.

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