I have been burned by Western Digital too many times to trust them. I was never able to confirm whether their SSDs support any form of power loss protection.
Kingston do not make their own flash, and the quality of their drives is consequentially variable from batch and model to model. I have had both Kingston RAM and Kingston SSDs go bad well within normal hardware lifespan, and the fiasco over the V300 SSDs where Kingston shipped review samples with faster flash and controllers and then changed the production units has put me off for good.
Kingston do not make their own flash, and the quality of their drives is consequentially variable from batch and model to model. I have had both Kingston RAM and Kingston SSDs go bad well within normal hardware lifespan, and the fiasco over the V300 SSDs where Kingston shipped review samples with faster flash and controllers and then changed the production units has put me off for good.
When I started considering SSDs a couple years ago, I evaluated many manufacturers but quickly narrowed my list to those who make their own Flash, so Crucial and Samsung. Intel was a close third.
There is no "the one".
WD and SanDisk, today the same company for SSD production. Currently being sued for having produced external SSDs under both brand names which suddenly bricked and wiped the data on them. Also a scandal with critical firmware updates being needed for the SA510 line of WD branded internal drives.
As you can image if you have 16 different voltage levels in a single cell then even if a couple of electrons leak you have a different value (this can possible be corrected by ECC etc)
For me the most important factor for an SSD is the quality of the wear-leveling.
And I will stay far away from the QLC type of drives. The problem is most manufactures don't mention type type of cell anymore.
As you can image if you have 16 different voltage levels in a single cell then even if a couple of electrons leak you have a different value (this can possible be corrected by ECC etc)
P.S. this is my personal opinion.
source of the image https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/difference-between-slc-mlc-tlc-3d-nand
Benno
I don't think 100K SLC is even made anymore, and what parts are available are tiny.
Look at the datasheets that have escaped into the public, or divide "TBW" by the capacity of an SSD to get the real endurance figures.
TLC is more realistically a few hundred cycles for 5 years, and QLC probably around 100 for 3 years.
Can anyone give me a good reason not to select a WD RED SA500? (speed reasons are only "good" in my books if the speed of this would be actively worse than the spinning rust Toshiba MQ01ABD100 models I am used to)
I have been burned by Western Digital too many times to trust them. I was never able to confirm whether their SSDs support any form of power loss protection.
Can anyone give me a good reason not to select a WD RED SA500? (speed reasons are only "good" in my books if the speed of this would be actively worse than the spinning rust Toshiba MQ01ABD100 models I am used to)
I have been burned by Western Digital too many times to trust them. I was never able to confirm whether their SSDs support any form of power loss protection.
I doubt any consumer grade SSDs would have usable power loss protection.
If you care you'd buy an enterprise grade drive (which has expensive supercaps inside), or, use a UPS (probably the cheaper option).
Some of the early SATA SSDs claimed to complete work in progress as the power fell. I don't know about current SATA drives, but NVMe drives don't seem to have anything big enough to store some energy to do that.
In the absence of capacitors for energy storage, drives can achieve power loss protection by ensuring that the specifications for write command semantics are strictly adhered to (i.e. only signalling that a write command is complete when the data is flash and metadata has been appropriately updated), and maintaining internal metadata integrity with journalling. This does not necessarily mean that all in-progress writes will be committed, but it does mean that applications and file systems can maintain internal consistency, and databases can maintain transactional integrity/atomicity.