That's a awful short warranty for a 3d Nand SSD. WD has several HDD's with longer warranty's than this! madness! The endurance ratings are also very conservative. Whats up with Intel and WD intentionally crippling endurance stats on their lower end SSD's. I wanna buy something and have it last 10X it's warranty period, that way i get my moneys worth.
I love Samsung's 850 Pro warranty! I wish they would have done 10 years on the 950's as well
3 years is pretty normal, and inline with other WD products (hard drives) and honestly, around the lifespan of many PC's (although most people like myself move their old SSD's into new machines...I'm still running a few Intel X25-M's from ~2010)
But realistically the drives will be mostly worthless after 3 years, except for the 1TB-2TB models, perhaps. Much like 64GB-128GB drives were still pretty common 3 years ago, now they have disappeared from the market, so people who bought them 3 years ago and have them die are likely to take the opportunity to upgrade instead of go through the trouble of RMA'ing, shipping, and reinstalling/restoring a backup to a product that is slower, smaller, and less reliable than newer products that cost a negligible amount of money for their value.
But I mostly agree that if I purchased a 2TB model and it failed after 3 years, I'd be pretty pissed.
Keep in mind three caveats to SSD warranties: they do not cover data loss (unlike some hard drive warranties) they replace the product with a refurbished one and they are a complete pain in the ass (except for OCZ who advance ships a NEW - not refurbished - replacement 2 DAY AIR.
Samsung has actually denied RMA to both drives I've mailed in, an 840 EVO and a 840, instead shipping them back wiped with new firmwares. Both still had the infamous issues plaguing those drives. ADATA took 2 weeks to turn around a drive I shipped them, with a newer, but refurbished model, that failed to even detect after installing the OS (probably why it was refurbished - someone sent it in, it appeared fine, and they just sent it to me after a secure erase.)
Overall buy based on price, reliability, and brand recognition. WD is pricing these aggressively, using quality components (I am a particular fan of Marvell-based SSD's for reliability) and they are not a tiny company that will be a pain in the ass to deal with or a huge company that doesn't care like Samsung.
I'm not sure two of your caveats about SSDs are any different from HDDs. I've never seen a consumer drive that covers data loss. Which brand were you referring to? I'm genuinely curious about this, because that would be an awesome warranty. HDDs are usually refurbished as well. That's all I've ever gotten from Seagate. Again, maybe some brands are better, but I don't think refurbished units are uncommon.
So none of those Usage patterns take into account the multiple 10's of GBs written every day by any modern browser. That doesn't seem logical.
Firefox and Chrome both can consume upwards of 100GB of writes per day for an avid web browser, and even with my own usage of maybe 10-20 tabs tops, it can top 10+GB a day just for the browser.
I don't use Chrome because of it's Google/Alphabet origin (pretty sure you can do it, but I've never personally tried), but Firefox can easily be configured to dump its cache only to system memory rather than writing to your system's hard drive. There's a couple of advantages in doing that sort of thing beyond drive write reduction including the elimination of cookies each time the browser is closed. Yes, you'll have to type in user names and passwords to open things, but you get the benefit of being a tiny bit harder to monitor. You can also put all that extra RAM you'd otherwise not use very effectively to good use. Lifehacker has a pretty good set of articles about how to do that. Between that and turning off indexing, disabling virtual memory, and a few other tricks, you could cut down on the amount of disk write activity and potentially increase longevity.
The problem is with constant updating of browser user profile not with a content cache (It is best to leave the cache off in case of a good ISP anyway).
Sure the frequency of the updates can be chaged if it is desired, but with a risk of missing history after browser failure, power outage, etc
Also being in the windows insider program can put some pretty heavy use on an SSD. Especially in the fast ring, reinstalling windows once every week or two will chew up a lot of writes!
Rubbish. Reinstalling Windows every week would use something like 2-3GB a day, not even close to the 10GB a day "light/average" user rating, and would take hundreds of years to wear out even the gimped TBW ratings on these drives.
-Disable indexing and prefetech (superfetch is fine as it uses ram) -Move pagefile to an HDD (if you got enough ram you won't need to access it) -Move your browser cache to an HDD or keep it in ram (you can do that with firefox)
If intel didn't limit their Optane to just intel chipsets, they could be a nice pagefile, cache and to dumb some heavy write programs to an 16-32GB optane.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
12 Comments
Back to Article
Morawka - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
That's a awful short warranty for a 3d Nand SSD. WD has several HDD's with longer warranty's than this! madness! The endurance ratings are also very conservative. Whats up with Intel and WD intentionally crippling endurance stats on their lower end SSD's. I wanna buy something and have it last 10X it's warranty period, that way i get my moneys worth.I love Samsung's 850 Pro warranty! I wish they would have done 10 years on the 950's as well
bigboxes - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
My SanDisk Extreme Pro has a 10 year warranty as well. Been rock solid for 2 1/2 years of 24/7 usage.Samus - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
3 years is pretty normal, and inline with other WD products (hard drives) and honestly, around the lifespan of many PC's (although most people like myself move their old SSD's into new machines...I'm still running a few Intel X25-M's from ~2010)But realistically the drives will be mostly worthless after 3 years, except for the 1TB-2TB models, perhaps. Much like 64GB-128GB drives were still pretty common 3 years ago, now they have disappeared from the market, so people who bought them 3 years ago and have them die are likely to take the opportunity to upgrade instead of go through the trouble of RMA'ing, shipping, and reinstalling/restoring a backup to a product that is slower, smaller, and less reliable than newer products that cost a negligible amount of money for their value.
But I mostly agree that if I purchased a 2TB model and it failed after 3 years, I'd be pretty pissed.
Keep in mind three caveats to SSD warranties: they do not cover data loss (unlike some hard drive warranties) they replace the product with a refurbished one and they are a complete pain in the ass (except for OCZ who advance ships a NEW - not refurbished - replacement 2 DAY AIR.
Samsung has actually denied RMA to both drives I've mailed in, an 840 EVO and a 840, instead shipping them back wiped with new firmwares. Both still had the infamous issues plaguing those drives. ADATA took 2 weeks to turn around a drive I shipped them, with a newer, but refurbished model, that failed to even detect after installing the OS (probably why it was refurbished - someone sent it in, it appeared fine, and they just sent it to me after a secure erase.)
Overall buy based on price, reliability, and brand recognition. WD is pricing these aggressively, using quality components (I am a particular fan of Marvell-based SSD's for reliability) and they are not a tiny company that will be a pain in the ass to deal with or a huge company that doesn't care like Samsung.
cfenton - Thursday, June 1, 2017 - link
I'm not sure two of your caveats about SSDs are any different from HDDs. I've never seen a consumer drive that covers data loss. Which brand were you referring to? I'm genuinely curious about this, because that would be an awesome warranty. HDDs are usually refurbished as well. That's all I've ever gotten from Seagate. Again, maybe some brands are better, but I don't think refurbished units are uncommon.James5mith - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
So none of those Usage patterns take into account the multiple 10's of GBs written every day by any modern browser. That doesn't seem logical.Firefox and Chrome both can consume upwards of 100GB of writes per day for an avid web browser, and even with my own usage of maybe 10-20 tabs tops, it can top 10+GB a day just for the browser.
I think they are underestimating usage.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
I don't use Chrome because of it's Google/Alphabet origin (pretty sure you can do it, but I've never personally tried), but Firefox can easily be configured to dump its cache only to system memory rather than writing to your system's hard drive. There's a couple of advantages in doing that sort of thing beyond drive write reduction including the elimination of cookies each time the browser is closed. Yes, you'll have to type in user names and passwords to open things, but you get the benefit of being a tiny bit harder to monitor. You can also put all that extra RAM you'd otherwise not use very effectively to good use. Lifehacker has a pretty good set of articles about how to do that. Between that and turning off indexing, disabling virtual memory, and a few other tricks, you could cut down on the amount of disk write activity and potentially increase longevity.helvete - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
The problem is with constant updating of browser user profile not with a content cache (It is best to leave the cache off in case of a good ISP anyway).Sure the frequency of the updates can be chaged if it is desired, but with a risk of missing history after browser failure, power outage, etc
extide - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Also being in the windows insider program can put some pretty heavy use on an SSD. Especially in the fast ring, reinstalling windows once every week or two will chew up a lot of writes!qasdfdsaq - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link
Rubbish. Reinstalling Windows every week would use something like 2-3GB a day, not even close to the 10GB a day "light/average" user rating, and would take hundreds of years to wear out even the gimped TBW ratings on these drives.Lolimaster - Friday, August 4, 2017 - link
You can simply move firefox cache to the HDD, makes 0 difference between SSD/HDD or just create ramdisk or as below, keep the cache in ram.Lolimaster - Friday, August 4, 2017 - link
Main things you want to increase life:-Disable indexing and prefetech (superfetch is fine as it uses ram)
-Move pagefile to an HDD (if you got enough ram you won't need to access it)
-Move your browser cache to an HDD or keep it in ram (you can do that with firefox)
If intel didn't limit their Optane to just intel chipsets, they could be a nice pagefile, cache and to dumb some heavy write programs to an 16-32GB optane.
Lolimaster - Friday, August 4, 2017 - link
Browser cache barely benefits from SSD speeds, having them on HDD is basically the same.