I agree one should avoid cheap ssd’s, I just have a bit different take. While my experience has been in DRAM manufacture and not NAND, large memory manufacturers in my experience scrap their non-conforming parts. However, memory (at least DRAM) silicon is produced with more capacity than needed and fuses for the excess will be blown to bring it into to spec during testing. The bigger issue and more likely problem with cheap SSD drives is that there is always a supply of knock-off dummy chips that smaller assembly operations are more likely to fall prey to. Those chips may contain no silicon at all or bare silicon in some instances (I have seen both.) Manufacturer markings are often forged quite well.
Thx Peter. Just to be clear, the links I posted are to very reputable brands, hence my comment that it’s not exactly cheap, but it is a very good value for top-tier performance. It was not meant to be an example of cheap or off-brand chancy stuff.
Just out of curiosity, what are the trade offs between buying a 2.5 enclosure and a sata drive vs an m.2 / nvme? Is there anything in heat dissipation / longevity / reliability specific to the form factor? Thanks.
The tradeoffs are more likely to be between brands of the enclosures/SSDs, rather than the form factor.
I’ve had two brands of M.2 enclosures in use here: StarTech and Unitek. The StarTech was bought some years back to hold my ROCK/NUC backups on a Samsung M.2 SSD. It’s still going strong.
The Unitek was bought in October 2020 and fitted with a WD M.2 120GB SSD. The unit started giving trouble last August, and gave up the ghost altogether in December. I don’t know which to blame, the enclosure or the SSD, since I can no longer take them apart…
Depending on the NVMe, they can run pretty hot. I have a Samsung 980 Pro in my desktop (not where I store my music) and I keep a heatsink on it. That’s a very specific, high performance drive though. But other than that, no, no real difference
1 Like
Caveat emptor.
1 Like
And there it is…
1 Like
Storage and memory basically have a commodity rate per gigabyte / terabyte. Be as cautious about buying below this rate as you would be buying gold or silver. There are no great deals when it comes to this stuff. If a cost breakthrough occurs it will happen across the industry at relatively the same time not from some unknown one-off brand.
The last “deal” I got was about $21.70 a TB for spinning disk. SSD is considerably more money and looking at current pricing I’m seeing an average of $115 per TB for solid state USB and a bit less than that for the mvne you can put in your own case. The “deal” posted is the equivalent of fool’s gold trying to sell SSD under spinning disk prices. Don’t be cheap with your data storage folks. 
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 36 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.