Question Best "cheap" small SSD's?

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ember1205

Honorable
Oct 6, 2016
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I need to buy some smaller SSD's and am wondering who makes a decent one at a low price point.

I have Kingston drives that have outright died on me quickly and without warning, so I'm hesitant to go that route. On the flip side, my Crucial and Samsung EVO drives have been extremely reliable but are more than I'd like to spend per drive.

For some context... I am building out a handful of Intel NUC's to replace RPi devices throughout the home. Some will be on 24x7, some will be on per a specific schedule, and some are used "when needed." I may end up building additional devices to spread the workload around and off of my heavier virtualization environment simply because these would use small amounts of power and have a tiny footprint.

I really don't need anything more than about a 128GB drive as the rest would largely be wasted space. If I can't find anything that's fairly low cost for what I need, I may just embark on a path of setting them up to PXE boot since I'm going to be running linux on all of them anyhow.
 
Warranties are a marketing thing. They have more to do with helping sales than being any indication of of how confident they are in their product. For example many of those USB flash drives with only 100 write cycles have lifetime warranties. To the manufacturer, a replacement drive is so cheap to make as to be nearly free, while it can be costly to you if mailing it in for RMA costs you more in postage than the drive is worth. So it's especially a win/win for the manufacturer as they know there will be few claims.

"Lifetime" brake pads used to be a thing and they would gladly exchange them every year for you because they were also nearly free to make and back then people changed cars every 5-7 years anyway. But eventually you wised up and realized that non-lifetime pads lasted way longer, stopped better + quieter and left less dust on your wheels from not wearing the rotors away as quickly. That is, it was better to pay more for higher quality without the lifetime warranty as it was less work for you.

The Inland warranty is great if you are near a store because warranty returns are handled right in the stores with no hassle and you can get a replacement instantly, just like at Harbor Freight (Sears used to be even more convenient because it was truly unconditional lifetime and you didn't even need a receipt! You could take in a 50yo rusted and modified/welded-on item from a yard sale and exchange for new. I guess that kind of explains why they are mostly gone). It's less useful and valuable if you have to mail it in and wait.

Otherwise the most convenient warranties are the ones where you can send a picture of the broken product or what it's doing, and get a replacement shipped to you free with no need to return it like Tekton (some places will require you to send a picture of a cut-off power cord or something to prove it's decommissioned, and hilariously I've seen a case where they demanded a detachable IEC power cable be cut)

Some manufacturers have such a bad rep that they have to offer 10 year warranties to get people to buy--Kia/Hyundai and Volkswagen are notable examples. But warranties can be rather difficult to claim: for example LG proudly plasters a 10-year Warranty badge right on the front of their home appliances, yet if you try to take advantage of it you will discover they require paying for an overpriced factory technician visit and diagnosis and then it only covers parts and not labor, so it's nearly worthless.

Other manufacturers only list a 1 to 5 year warranty but it's really (and not-so-secretly) lifetime if you don't abuse it like people did to Sears--Glock comes to mind but there are many companies that do this which don't even use folded sheetmetal, MiM and injection-molded plastic so it costs them more. Those are the companies that really believe in and stand behind their products.

If Inland Pro is S13/T and Platinum is SM2259XT then both are comparable entry-level controllers. The latter would be like the 120GB Patriot Burst Elite from reviews of that drive in February (before it was switched over to use a Maxion controller--and note the larger drives are QLC) so a little slower than the S13. 128GB Patriot P210 is the same as the Burst Elite except in QLC. The 120GB of the Burst Elite may just be 7% overprovisioning vs. the 128GB Platinum.
 

ember1205

Honorable
Oct 6, 2016
36
1
10,535
If Inland Pro is S13/T and Platinum is SM2259XT then both are comparable entry-level controllers. The latter would be like the 120GB Patriot Burst Elite from reviews of that drive in February (before it was switched over to use a Maxion controller--and note the larger drives are QLC) so a little slower than the S13. 128GB Patriot P210 is the same as the Burst Elite except in QLC. The 120GB of the Burst Elite may just be 7% overprovisioning vs. the 128GB Platinum.

I'm presuming that you're calling out specific drive models which I don't see listed on the Amazon links that I included. As far as the warranty info - I only included that for reference in the "quick notes" that I listed per drive.

There are a lot of areas of "IT" where I am quite well-versed. SSD's is not one of them and I'm hoping to get a quick couple of comments to steer me in a particular direction. If any of the drives I listed and linked to is sufficiently better than the others for my needs, great. If not, they're basically a crap shoot and I can buy on price. If none of them is going to fit the use case (size and price are covered, so I'm basically needing to estimate whether they'll likely give me a few years' use without incident or not), then I'll just pursue PXE boot for the machines.
 
I'm presuming that you're calling out specific drive models which I don't see listed on the Amazon links that I included. As far as the warranty info - I only included that for reference in the "quick notes" that I listed per drive.
No, those are the drives. Someone in this thread said the current Inland Pro uses a S13 controller, and the Inland Platinum is SM2259XT. Since they almost always use the reference design, you can look at reviews of a comparable drive which I listed.

As for the warranty rant, someone in this very thread said they'd rather buy a drive designed to last 1/100 as long because it's good enough and has a warranty. I can understand that viewpoint, but would personally rather have the older drive that was designed to originally sell for $700 than one actually intended for a <$20 pricepoint simply because it's probably a lot better made (and with enterprise features like a capacitor bank to complete writes to flash after abrupt power loss). They also claimed to never hear about anyone running into the TBW despite posting the same day in a thread about someone going 19x the TBW in normal use, but that's OK as we all get forgetful in old age.

As I said previously, you can go well over the TBW with no noticeable issues, but the drive can get forgetful if powered off for a long time, and of course then the warranty is expired too.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
They also claimed to never hear about anyone running into the TBW despite posting the same day in a thread about someone going 19x the TBW in normal use, but that's OK as we all get forgetful in old age.
That was me.
And in that discussion, I completely missed the actual "1400TBW" that this drive in question supposedly went to.

That does not change the fact that no one has replied in the affirmative to my question of - "Have you ever..."
 
Well to be fair it's kind of hard to notice going over the TBW when nothing happens--no alarm bells or popup warnings or anything. Only someone who purposely runs a drive utility and happens to notice will get alarmed about it, so there are probably a lot of drives past the TBW.

My local computer stores toss drives like that rather than sell them, even though they could still be useful for the right customer only using it for a scratch disk or something.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Well to be fair it's kind of hard to notice going over the TBW when nothing happens--no alarm bells or popup warnings or anything. Only someone who purposely runs a drive utility and happens to notice will get alarmed about it, so there are probably a lot of drives past the TBW.

My local computer stores toss drives like that rather than sell them, even though they could still be useful for the right customer only using it for a scratch disk or something.
Just like me, you are what would be considered a power user.

Have any of your personal SSDs gone past the warranty TBW?
 
Nope, not even close. But then all of my oldest SSD drives are SLC and large process size so for example all the X25-E have a TBW rating of 2 Petabytes (2,000TB) and even 10 years later they are showing 99% remaining.

I have exhausted the write cycles of USB sticks, CF cards and SD cards, and even monitors (the settings are saved into flash and when you can no longer save to it then any adjustments no longer "stick" and undo themselves once the OSD is closed), but those were often made of the lowest quality flash. I've flashed the same routers hundreds of times and those NVRAM chips seem to be a lot more durable.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Nope, not even close. But then all of my oldest SSD drives are SLC and large process size so for example all the X25-E have a TBW rating of 2 Petabytes (2,000TB) and even 10 years later they are showing 99% remaining.
And of my couple of dozen SSDs, going back a decade, both cheap and good, I've not come close either.
As it is with most people.

The reason I suggested "new+warranty" vs "used and uber write cycles" was because the probable usage would never even come close to running out of write cycles.

But it may die of something else, bringing a warranty replacement into play.

My one dead SSD, 960 GB Sandisk, was not even at 10% of its rated TBW at 3 years of use.
Yet it died, for reasons unknown

33 days past the 3 year warranty.
I knew it was past, they knew it was past.
But SanDisk gave me a new one anyway.