An interesting article about WD and SSD speeds.

[KGIII]

I'll skip sharing my thoughts on the subject and just link the article.

Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50% [Updated]

Most people wouldn't notice most of the time, but that doesn't make it OK.

arstechnica.com

I will also add that I've had great luck with a budget brand storage company called TeamGroup.

 

[f33dm3bits]

Thanks for sharing! I always buy WD disks for my homeserver, luckily I only buy normal WD hard disks for storage for non-important things.

 

[KGIII]

So far, I haven't had any failures with the TeamGroup drives that I've purchased, which is a nice surprise. I initially bought the first couple just because the price was absurd and I wouldn't be out any real money by testing them. Their MTBF seems to be pretty solid.

 

[dcbrown73]

I actually quit buying WD probably 10 years ago. (they notoriously fail shortly after their warranty lol) Their failure rates even on their higher class drives was dismal. Seagate was better, but now buying even their drives is not a good deal.

Today, for my home PC, I will only buy Samsung SSD drives mostly and for my home servers, I go on eBay and purchase refurbished Enterprise drives. You can get them fairly cheap and they are Enterprise class drives which are so much better than Consumer and Prosumer drives of any brand.

 

[f33dm3bits]

I've had the exact opposite experience with WD drive, they've always lasted me long and only had 2 fail over long time use. I find ssd's too expensive for storage that isn't that important.

 

[KGIII]

I haven't purchased any spinning platter drives in a long time. I still have some in use, but all my recent purchases have been SSDs. I've been really impressed with M.2 SSDs. Man, are they fast.

 

[f33dm3bits]

I currently have 2 6TB WD's in my homeserver for non-important files, if I would use SSD's for that it would cost me almost 1000 dollars which is not worth it for me. Personal files and other stuff that are important I store on an SSD which I also backup.

 

[KGIII]

I suspect that I'll (probably in the next few years) have no more of the older, mechanical drives. The ones I still have are long in the tooth and mostly external drives. I have a WD external drive that stays plugged in and powered on pretty much 24/7. It's only 1 TB, but it refuses to die. IIRC (I looked it up when I bought it), it has a WD Blue HDD in it. It's gotta be a decade old, probably a little older. I have no idea why it's still working, but it works just fine.

 

[dcbrown73]

I currently have 2 6TB WD's in my homeserver for non-important files, if I would use SSD's for that it would cost me almost 1000 dollars which is not worth it for me. Personal files and other stuff that are important I store on an SSD which I also backup.

Yeah, I don't have tons of data to store. Actually, I do have a Plex server, but all the movies on it where the one my buddy copied over when his Plex server was here.

I just have (4) 2TB Enterprise drives in RAID5 I bought on eBay for $20 each about three years ago. My NAS really doesn't require any speed since it's only connected at 1GB anyhow. I currently don't run any VMs besides a Kali install and a TeamSpeak server that I no longer use in favor of Discord.

My desktop has like five different drives in it. They are just drives from previous desktops I had in the past. I never end up formatting them and they sometimes have data that I still like to keep around but not to worried about losing.

That said, I'm going to rescue one of our old Proxmox server (Dell R410 with 128GB of memory) at work. It's been sitting on the shelf since we replaced the cluster with vSAN nodes.

It only has dual 256GB SSD (RAID1) drives in it though as it was connected to a storage array for the real VM storage. So I will likely pick up some drives off ebay for it. (wish I had a 10GB switch at home hah as it has (2) 10GB SPF+ ports on it!)

 

[NORD]

Are these the same as M.2 ssd?

 

[KGIII]

Are these the same as M.2 ssd?

The first mentioned drive is the WD Blue SN550 which appears to be an NVMe SSD in the M.2 format. So, it looks like it. The article is updated with a response from WD that's apparently a half-arsed apology.