Let's be clear that a failing part is one thing but silently dumping them on the public is the unforgivable failure. I hope shareholders are seeing this and selling.
I've soured on them a bit recently. The 980 Pro firmware bugs hit me on a bunch of machines.
Samsung refuse to use the Linux Vendor Firmware Service that enables fwupd to apply firmware updates (even though Dell resold Samsung products receive updates here. Thanks Dell!).
The official Samsung firmware updater image is/was (for years) broken on modern AMD platforms (guess what I was running all of those 10NVMes in?)
Yeah Sammy still makes some of the best drives in the industry. However, the company is pretty scummy. So keep that in mind if customer support is important to you. Also bear in mind, they offer no warranty service from Canada, you will be sent to the US centre and from there, it’s all uphill as they will cite region conflicts, etc. RMA will be hit and miss.
Basically manufacturers now are cutting DRAM from their offerings which means most drives can’t handle large files as that I’ll overflow their paltry buffers and your speeds will plummet to that of a USB drive. WD SN770, Crucial P3, Kingston NV2, all omit DRAM. In fact, most of the cheaper offerings cut the feature on their drives.
As a general rule, I look at DRAM first, then cell type (try to avoid QLC over TLC), controller type can be important if you have specific needs (I purchased a m.2 to CDEF adapter for my Xbox and it only supports drives with a specific controller), and then warranty and product support.
I had watched a video some years ago of LTT about DRAM-less SSD and had been actively avoiding them since then.
Will surely keep these details in mind.
I've bought exclusively WD storage for many years. Mostly because I've never had a failure, and hadn't read anything terrible about reliability. Well, all that changed this year.
My newest portable drive (Passport Ultra USB-C 2TB) has only 30 hours (40 power cycles) on it, and is clicking/chirping and abnormally slow while writing anything. Probably dying, at least it warned me. It will need to be replaced, at my cost (just out if warranty of course). Combined with SanDisk failures, and complete silence from WD... I'm done with them.
I'm moving to Samsung. I've already bought a replacement (T7 Shield SSD 2TB), and also an M2 NVME (980 Pro with Heatsink) for PC OS refresh later. Hoping to move almost all the things to Samsung SSDs in coming years, outside of 1-2 large Seagate HDDs for NAS.
Bye WD. I do not tolerate reliability issues when it comes to data storage. Or silence from companies when there are massive public failures. Or buying out and destroying the competition.
For memory Samsung all day. Micro/SD cards etc the big camera manufacturers source solid stuff if you aren’t a fan of Samsung.
If you’re talking about readers I don’t think anyone does anything particularly well. Anker might be my preferred brand though. Lots of companies rip them off.
Had an SSD of theirs fail and it took weeks to get a warranty replacement out and was the biggest hassle ever. If the customer service was tolerable I'd have considered renting, but even without this news I'd never buy or recommend them.