WD Blue SSD

"Write Speeds sub-par" 2 stars "Drive Failed After 3 Months" 1 star "Worked fine until it died" 2 stars "Failed after 16 months" 1 star "Do not buy this drive until WD fix their QC issue" 1 star "Absolute trash (20 day lifespan) 1 star

Yes, an interesting set of review samples so far.

Some of their NVMe get better reviews than that.

"1TB Blue sports a 400TBW rating" (sometimes, a manufacturer doesn't even know how to rate these, like in the old days)

(A comparable 870 from Samsung, is 600TBW, and there are devices at the 1TB capacity level with a higher wear-life-TBW than that.)

TLC chips were supposed to have a "raw" lifespan of 3000 writes per cell. 600 writes per cell rating helps codify the write amplification factor as the controller re-arranges the data storage during later maintenance (moving from pseudo-SLC cache to main TLC storage area, or defragging 4K blocks within a page after a 4K random write test).

The brands of flash, have different internal layouts, tiling patterns and cell spacing. This can affect pattern sensitivity (like, when the cells are getting mushy and close to voltage thresholds). If two flash brands were "22nm", the center to center on the cells could be different for the two products.

There's no way for a mere enthusiast review site, to offer that level of insight about the NAND chips. Only TechInsights with their electron microscope and vat of battery acid, can do that sort of analysis (for a price). There's not really much an enthusiast site can do, to pre-warn you about expected trouble. The trouble, after all, could be firmware related, and the flash itself is "not guilty yer honour".

The firmware in the industry, seemed to go through a "transition" phase, as if word of how to design the firmware was making the rounds. It seems products today, are much better compared to the "I turned it on and it died" that used to happen when SSDs first came out.

At first, SSDs had a pad on the PCB for a "Supercap", which is an energy storage device, and on power-fail, that provided power until all the cached blocks in DRAM were flushed. One of the objectives of the firmware writers, was to *eliminate* the need for that safety feature. When the power goes off today, it is the firmware design, that saves your ass.

Paul

I've been avoiding WD and (WD owned) SanDisk SSDs ever since reading this:

Geoff Clare snipped-for-privacy@clare.See-My-Signature.invalid> wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ID-313840.user.individual.net:

Many to be found on ebay, I was tempted until I found the many data loss/bricking claims. From memory some suggested it was a thermal issue.

Thank you, that rings an awful lot of bells sadly. I still have two of the originals in my server and now two new ones of course, wary of using any of them now.

"Jeff Gaines" snipped-for-privacy@outlook.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net:

I'm not sure there was anything wrong (sorry, that much wrong . . ) with the memory modules themselves but running them in a compact, sealed and heatsinkless enclosure exposed the modules to serious overtemperature issues.

I have seen a single report that it is WD Blacks that are in them, not the Blues you are having trouble with but have no way of checking that. WD_BLACK SN850XE 4TB in the 4T version.