Comment by ricardobeat

2 years ago

Misleading headline since after testing eight more drives, none more failed.

2/12 is not nearly as dramatic as “half”, and the ones that lost data are the cheap brands as one would expect.

You can either not editorialize the title, and accept that the thread contains updates, or editorialize it and violate HN guidelines.

Either choice will lead somebody to complain

> "... and the ones that lost data are the cheap brands as one would expect."

What a sad world to live in, when one comes to expect cheap storage devices to not fulfill intended function.

SK Hynix is a major brand and the P31 is a great midrange SSD... except for the fact that it seemingly doesn't care about your data.

  • > SK Hynix is a major brand

    Is it? I passed on an offer for a drive carrying that name, and got something else for slightly more, the other day as I didn't know the name.

    Perhaps their noteworthiness varies internationally? Or do they mainly sell to manufacturers rather than direct to the likes of me?

    • They are even among the manufacturers of actual flash memory chips.

      > Or do they mainly sell to manufacturers rather than direct to the likes of me?

      This. Think they mostly sell OEM SSDs under their name, if you buy a laptop or pre built system from a major manufacturer chances are not that low that you find a SK Hynix SSD in there.

  • I have a Sabrent M2 in my own PC, bought it because it was the cheapest option. Incidentally I suspect it's the cause of system-wide slowdown in the past few months, even opening the file explorer takes over ten seconds sometimes.

To me the real thing missing is whether those drive advertise power loss protection or not. The next question is whether they are to be used in a laptop where power loss protection is less relevant given the local battery.

  • That should be irrelevant, because flush is flush right? If your SSD does not write the data after a flush it's violating basic hard drive functionality.

    • GP has a point in that a laptop is much less likely to experience unplanned power loss because of the built in battery. However that does not help desktops which also use NVME SSDs.

      The other problem is that this doesn't only cause problems resulting from power loss. At least some files systems guarantee consistency of data on the drive by flushing at critical points. ZFS on Linux does this. If the flush doesn't happen as promised, subsequent writes could result in corrupted files should something else like a crash interrupt operation.