Favored/Favorite SSDs Right Now

britechguy

britechguy

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Well, my residential client's old WD 380GB HDD is off to the data recovery lab.

Given that 500GB SSDs are both a huge increase in the capacity for his machine as well as giving a massive boost in speed, getting one is a no-brainer. But the collective experience here with SSDs would be invaluable as far as making a choice, as there are many of you who are doing far more drive replacements than I ever will.

So, any specific ones you recommend or think should be avoided at the current time.

Several examples I'm considering:

Silicon Power 512 GB

ADATA 512 GB

WD Blue 500 GB

ADATA 480 GB

Hynix Gold 500 GB

Sandisk 480 GB

and, as always, I'm open to other suggestions. While I know the technology has improved quite a bit since its inception, I'm sure certain makers produce a more robust product than others.
 
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Samsung 860 evos, crucial mx500 series, and WD Blue are the main ones I use.

If someone wants to be cheap I sometimes go with the Adata ones.
 
We only buy Samsung, Intel, WD Blue, Sandisk, and Kingston (these have recently been consistently the cheapest, name-brand SSD available).

We avoid Crucial, ADATA, Silicon Power, or any other weird off-brand SSD.
 
britechguy said:
Silicon Power 512 GB
Click to expand...
Purchased 39 times.
You last purchased this item on June 26, 2020

No issues and good bang for the buck.

Guess you found the other drive bad after all?
This is my stats on the 256 gig size.
Purchased 75 times.
You last purchased this item on June 4, 2020.

1TB size not as many of course.
Purchased 11 times.
You last purchased this item on June 26, 2020.
 
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sapphirescales said:
We only buy Samsung, Intel, WD Blue, Sandisk, and Kingston (these have recently been consistently the cheapest, name-brand SSD available).

We avoid Crucial, ADATA, Silicon Power, or any other weird off-brand SSD.
Click to expand...

I've had good luck so far with crucial mx500's. Did you have a lot of those come back? I've only used a few Adata ones so not enough to know really on those. I forgot I tried kingston a few times on cheaper ones and they seemed fine. Samsung's are my favorite ones by far though.

I think I bought like 10 crucial ones one time when the samsungs were out of stock...hopefully they don't come back lol. Since then I've just bought a few here and there.
 
First, thanks to all who've responded.

I ended up going for a PNY 500GB since I've had no issues with their products in the past and wanted to get this order in so I have the drive by Sunday or Monday. The funny thing is that I probably won't have the mounting bracket by then (I don't have any at the moment) so I may have to leave the machine is a "state of deshabille" for a day or two as far as getting the drive tidily mounted again.

This all goes back to the Dell Optiplex 3010 machine I asked about not long ago. Fired right up and worked normally for me, and for days afterward for the client, then the HDD went south right after a Windows Update. The drive's packed to be sent to the data recovery service and I just want to get him back up and running ASAP since his only real connection to the outside world at the moment is cyber, and he does a lot of emailing and online banking. Luckily email is via webmail, so no loss there. It appears that most of his data will be MS Office documents, specifically Word, if they're recoverable.

Now for the fun of doing a completely clean reinstall of Windows 10 Version 2004 on an SSD. This should be a cinch, but the way this has been spinning out so far I'm not so sure anymore . . . I have the media for 1909 as well, so if push comes to shove I'll use that, but I'd rather he not have to go through a Feature Update in very short order after all that's already occurred.
 
Porthos said:
Guess you found the other drive bad after all?
Click to expand...

After what has occurred, I decided not to push my luck. I've done "clone and recover" before, but given the price differential between the amount of time I'd put in (and its cost) and that for a simple recovery (which is what I'm expecting, but . . .) from either $300 Data Recovery or Data Medics' no rush service, I couldn't justify even trying. They've got tools that I don't and specialize. This is one of those times I just didn't want to play around with anything related to getting stuff off a drive.

Not only that, but I want this gentleman to have an external backup drive and a backup protocol in place once I'm done. Since I needed to acquire an external backup drive as the recovery media, that will end up killing two birds with one stone.
 
britechguy said:
After what has occurred, I decided not to push my luck. I've done "clone and recover" before, but given the price differential between the amount of time I'd put in (and its cost) and that for a simple recovery (which is what I'm expecting, but . . .) from either $300 Data Recovery or Data Medics' no rush service, I couldn't justify even trying. They've got tools that I don't and specialize. This is one of those times I just didn't want to play around with anything related to getting stuff off a drive.

Not only that, but I want this gentleman to have an external backup drive and a backup protocol in place once I'm done. Since I needed to acquire an external backup drive as the recovery media, that will end up killing two birds with one stone.
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I glad you have a client willing to spend recovery lab costs. Mine say never mind.
 
lan101 said:
I've had good luck so far with crucial mx500's. Did you have a lot of those come back?
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I don't remember the exact numbers, but I deployed like 100 Crucial SSD's several years ago and within a year about 1/2 of them had failed. Then, 2 years later I bought a 500GB Crucial SSD for my personal writing computer. I wrote about 25 pages of a story over the course of several days, then the brand new SSD died. I did everything I could to recover the data but the thing was cold stone dead. That was the last time I bought a Crucial SSD. I've never had a good experience with them and I'll never buy them again. All they've done is cost me untold amounts of time and money.

I always used to buy Crucial RAM in the past and I've always had good luck with it, but I stopped buying RAM from them too because I feared the company had started selling junk. I know most techs here have had good luck with Crucial SSDs, but I've been burned too many times. I'd sooner buy a Chinese knock-off SSD from Alibaba than Crucial.
 
britechguy said:
This is one of those times I just didn't want to play around with anything related to getting stuff off a drive.
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If the drive will spin up I'll run a suspect/damaged drive through a ddrescue session which at least yields their data and usually a bootable drive. Else it's off to the professionals.

I've been a SanDisk fan for awhile now and have had two failures. A 120 GB Plus from the early days and 1 TB Ultra. I'm leaning towards Crucial these days but Samsung is my choice if I can charge a premium (businesses, etc.)
 
Porthos said:
I glad you have a client willing to spend recovery lab costs. Mine say never mind.
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The vast majority of mine would, too. I pushed a bit because it was clear to me that he really wanted his data back and given what's happened I really wanted specialists to be looking at the drive. I just hope it turns out to be what is, for them, an uncomplicated recovery. If, by some chance the quote were to come back in the range of $700-$1000 I think the decision will be to just ditch it.

But Data Medics now charges $425 for an uncomplicated single drive recovery at normal turnaround time, but discounts by $150 if you are willing to go "no rush," which means they work on it when they're otherwise slow. That's a very good deal, one I could not beat if I took over 3 hours trying to do a recovery, if you want your data back but are not in any particular hurry to receive it. When we're talking about stuff like music, family pictures, word processing documents that aren't for a book/article slated for publication in the next few weeks, there's just no reason not to go that route.
 
I buy whatever is cheapest at the time (which includes all those listed in your OP) unless the client is happy to pay for Samsung.
Only ever had 1 Toshiba OCZ fail.
Everything else has been great.
Been buying WD Green, TeamForce and Silicon Power lately.
 
I use Kingston as they are relatively cheap and i trust the brand. I have used ADATA a couple times with no issues but not enough to comment on reliability.
I bought a cheap pre-built desktop from one of our suppliers for my use as a second office PC which has a TeamGroup SSD in so we'll see how that goes. Im not storing anything precious on it at the moment so not a big deal if it fails.
I have used Intel, Samsung, Crucial and WD before all with no issues.
 
It appears that SSDs are likely made by a few producers, to spec, and with appropriate case and branding applied, at least based on the mixed bag of results from the same makes on display here.

I truly appreciate all the input. I'll report back if the PNY unit happens to go belly up unexpectedly early.

They also seem to be like virtually anything electronic on the whole in that they fail very early on or don't fail for a long, long time.
 
I use WD Blue almost exclusively because of the WD SSD Dashboard, and the Acronis license that comes with all WD products.

It covers my imaging process, and leaves the customer with a very easy to use software app to keep an eye on the drives's health as well as take care of any firmware updates that may come along. And if they're a managed client, I get to use those tools to make my life easier. Drive quality is respectable, I prefer Samsung SSDs in and of themselves but the supporting software for them is inferior to WD... which costs me time. The 5 year warranty is nice too.
 
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britechguy said:
It appears that SSDs are likely made by a few producers, to spec, and with appropriate case and branding applied, at least based on the mixed bag of results from the same makes on display here.
Click to expand...
Just like everything else in our industry. There are very few actual manufacturers of technology hardware
 
Mostly Crucial MX model.....I'd say a good amount over 2000 of 'em out in the field. Very good success with them. Some Samsungs...and some WD Blues (actually a rebranded Sandisk upper model since WD bought them up...I avoid spinner WD Blues like the plague)

With all brands, we update the firmware, and ensure the BIOS of the host computer is updated, when we upgrade/clone from spinner to SSD.
 
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