USB drive failure...or something worse?

[sfx2000]

That might explain your bad experiences compared to mine - I never used Kingston or ADATA SSDs (can`t remember who manufactures their controller or their NAND).

ADATA 128GB Sata SSD's of that era were typically Silicon Motion controllers with Micron NAND if that helps - assuming the drive was the SU800, which was pretty popular back then

The ADATA Ultimate SU800 SSD Review (128GB, 256GB, 512GB)

www.anandtech.com

Kingston is hard to tell because of their wide array of suppliers - there one would have to have the specific model number...

 

[RMerlin]

ADATA 128GB Sata SSD's of that era were typically Silicon Motion controllers with Micron NAND if that helps - assuming the drive was the SU800, which was pretty popular back then

So good NAND, bad controller then.

 

[drinkingbird]

My personal statistics - 4x dead SSDs, one on the way out and 1x only failed HDD. From flash drives - many failed SD cards including High Endurance and Industrial marketed. Motion cameras like GoPro eat them fast. USB flash drives - mostly luck, don't use them much. DRVs - WD Purple HDDs.

I've had far better reliability from SSDs than HDDs, even my original Patriot Pyro 60G (which was a cheap drive with not very good endurance rating) is surviving after over 100TBW. In over 10 years, only one SSD died on me and that was after the power blipped a couple times, that laptop had several other issues after that too. In that same time I've replaced several dead spinners for people (with SSDs).

Clearly you have to be picky, I stick with almost exclusively Samsung and Micron for SSD (though I've found Samsung MicroSD to be hit or miss). There are plenty of super cheap SSD out there (often with no DRAM cache) that are highly suspect.

As long as you don't cheap out on them, there is a lot less that can go wrong than with HDD.

Of course for large storage that doesn't need speed, spinners still have a place. I have a 1TB external backup drive (WD Green, slow but uses very little power) that still serves its purpose well. Granted 1TB is nowhere near considered large these days but I don't have tons of stuff to backup, I can store 2 years of daily differential backups on it. There are people with NVRs and NAS with 64+TB worth of spinners in them.

 

[drinkingbird]

Interesting - I'm primarily WD/SanDisk or Samsung for either NVMe or SATA if I have a choice. My build machine has a 1TB WD Black NVME drive, so that one is probably the most write intensive one in use over here... and moving that over to an HDD was be a bit hit on build time on a CI/CD pipeline w/automation.

I've got a couple of laptops with NVMe- one is SKHynix and the other is HGST - those have no choice, as there isn't a bay to drop in a SATA (SSD or HDD).

Fingers crossed - I have had good outcomes so far with SSD...

So far NVMe has proven just as reliable for me, however obviously have nowhere near as many years of experience to confirm. But as long as you use the proper heatsink, it really isn't different than a 2.5" SSD other than heat from the faster speed and smaller form factor. Of course if you're running that WD black at PCIE 4.0 x4 you really need to focus on keeping it cool.

My laptop is running a Samsung OEM PM981A which is the same as the 970 Evo Plus 512GB. I picked it mostly because of its really low latency and high endurance. It does have an SED chip on it but not making use of that. Since I only have x2 lanes on my PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot it is limited to about 1.7GB/sec but that's more than plenty for me. Laptop came with SATA M.2 and no heatsink so had to get the dell OEM heatsink to go with it but that was only another $7 (drive was like $32).

The nice thing about the OEM drive is they stuck with the Phoenix controller, where during the chip shortage they started using a crappier one on the Evo drives which showed good performance at the beginning of a write, but dropped off quickly (they did some trickery with the SLC cache to try and make it appear to have the same performance hoping nobody would notice).

 

[drinkingbird]

Depends on the use case, and obviously the drives...

Back in 2014, I migrated from 2.5 inch SAS drives (10K spinners, fast but hot and very noisy) over to Toshiba Enterprise SSD's for one of my engineering platforms (LTE HSS) on two sites hosting a high availability oracle database - Performance was much better, reliability was better, and much less heat in the chassis.

It really depends on the vendors, use case, and perhaps risk tolerance - my operations guys questioned the wisdom of the move, but that's their job (uptime is everything for them), but after 6 months, made believers out of them.

You think those were hot? I had two 15K SAS running in RAID 1 - even with fans blowing directly on the chips and another fan exhausting the air from that area, they both failed, luckily not at the same time, and luckily within warranty. I sold the refurbs I got and put in a couple Seagate Pro SSDs (picked due to the power loss protection even though it was on a UPS, it was a server and wanted to protect against power supply failure etc).

Never looked back, those two in RAID 1 (double read speed, single write speed) blew the doors off the 15Ks. And their specs are relatively slow compared to what you get now.

Though it was nice to have the free heater in the winter. And they sounded pretty cool spinning up, even if it took like 10 seconds.

 

[drinkingbird]

My personal experiences, having used/sold drives for close to 20 years as an IT professional:

I used to have good experiences with HP (I still have a very old Datatraveler 410 plugged into my main router, and it previously served as a bootable OS for my WDTV), I have no experience with their newer models. Got 2 or 3 very old DataTraveler USB 2.0 in a drawer that must be around 15 years old, mostly gathering dust due to their slow speed.

I thought datatraveler was kingston? Or did you have ones that HP white labeled?

I still have a 1GB Kingston Datatraveler from circa 2002 or so. It is the fastest thumb drive I've ever had (even faster than high speed MicroSD in a USB adapter) and cost around $100 at the time. Still use it for stuff that doesn't like larger drives, bios updates on old PCs, firmware update on various older products, etc. It used to get carried in my work bag and used constantly, it definitely is a tank.

 

[RMerlin]

I thought datatraveler was kingston? Or did you have ones that HP white labeled?

DataTraveler are Kingston. The HP drives I also talk about were different devices, they were rebranded PNY. These didn't last long.

 

[sfx2000]

You think those were hot? I had two 15K SAS running in RAID 1 - even with fans blowing directly on the chips and another fan exhausting the air from that area, they both failed, luckily not at the same time, and luckily within warranty.

I had to go back as look, and yeah, those were 15K HGST SAS drives... and not only do they run hot, they absolutely scream noisewise - with the drives and the fans, hearing protection was a must...

For context

Fill up all those bays - I had 4 of these - two in Denver, two in Chicago... even in the data center environment, where you have cold/hot sides, Denver always had it's challenges with thermals, and it was whack-a-mole with keeping those two fully up - at least with a read HW raid controller (LSI Megaraid), it's fairly trivial to hot-swap a new drive in and reysnc it back up with no downtime...

 

[drinkingbird]

DataTraveler are Kingston. The HP drives I also talk about were different devices, they were rebranded PNY. These didn't last long.

Oh you said "I used to have good experiences with HP (I still have a very old Datatraveler 410 plugged into my main router, and it previously served as a bootable OS for my WDTV)" assuming you meant Kingston not HP.

 

[drinkingbird]

I had to go back as look, and yeah, those were 15K HGST SAS drives... and not only do they run hot, they absolutely scream noisewise - with the drives and the fans, hearing protection was a must...

For context

Fill up all those bays - I had 4 of these - two in Denver, two in Chicago... even in the data center environment, where you have cold/hot sides, Denver always had it's challenges with thermals, and it was whack-a-mole with keeping those two fully up - at least with a read HW raid controller (LSI Megaraid), it's fairly trivial to hot-swap a new drive in and reysnc it back up with no downtime...

Yeah I had the dell rebranded megaraid with the two 15K SAS drives on it. Prior to SSD that was a damn fast setup. Then once I went to SSD, the same megaraid with the two SSDs in raid 1 was over 1GB/s read speed (write was around 500 since it didn't benefit from RAID 1). Not much by today's standards but incredible then.

Every data center I've been in has buckets of earplugs outside the door. You don't realize just how damaging that white noise is, even if it doesn't seem that loud.

I had a tower server with 2 of those drives in my office, it didn't seem that bad until I got rid of all my network gear and moved it to hosting. Eerie silence as hard to get used to.

I don't think mine were Hitachi, I want to say Seagate, been a long time though. Once they fully spun up they weren't bad, but during spin up there were a couple harmonics they hit that made your teeth hurt.

I specifically went with a tower server on its side on a shelf in the rack because all of their rack servers were stupidly loud, and I was running it out of my house.

 

[RMerlin]

Oh you said "I used to have good experiences with HP (I still have a very old Datatraveler 410 plugged into my main router, and it previously served as a bootable OS for my WDTV)" assuming you meant Kingston not HP.

Ah lapsus, sorry. I did mean Kingston there.

 

[drinkingbird]

Ah lapsus, sorry. I did mean Kingston there.

It's more common as we get up there.... Or rather with me these days I'm doing the work of two people and constantly catch myself putting totally wrong stuff (usually in time, not always). That's what they get for being cheap and cutting heads.