Recommend me a cheap but reliable SSD

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deadlyllama

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#255512 15-Aug-2019 12:12

The 240GB SSD in my old HP Elitebook 9470m keeps on running out of space.

I don't massively care about performance - most of my use is Word and Firefox - but I do care about reliability/endurance.

Is there anything in the 480-960GB range that's well priced and something you'd trust your data with? I'd prefer a 2.5" drive, then I can put the old drive in an enclosure and use it as a spare portable disk.

Dolts

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#2299738 15-Aug-2019 12:34

Something like a Samsung Evo or Crucial MX is a good choice.

freitasm

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#2299865 15-Aug-2019 15:57

I highgly recommend Crucial. Their SSD were always good and perform well... Currently using a 1TB NVME on my desktop, and a couple of 500GB ones for image backup of the boot drive. Very reliable.

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SpartanVXL

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#2299903 15-Aug-2019 17:46

Crucial mx500 series fits the criteria. Not as expensive as Samsung but not as cheap as some of the budget ssds (kingston etc.). Solid go-to recommendation.

deadlyllama

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#2300069 15-Aug-2019 22:20

Ok, looks like Crucial is the winner. Thanks everyone!

timmmay

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#2300149 16-Aug-2019 07:05

The thing about SSDs is the cheap ones put two, three or four bits per cell (MLC / TLC / QLC I think) using charge levels. The more bits per cell, the lower the tolerance for things not going quite right, and the lower the reliability. The modern 2 / 3 / 4 bit per cell SSDs may be great, but the fewer bits per cell the better the reliability.

If your disk is backed up, incrementally, this isn't really a big problem. Your risk is silent data corruption. I mitigate this using ReFS which does checksums on all the data in the disk, and can repair from the other disk in the storage space. That's on a spinning disk, you can't use ReFS on an OS disk. With an OS, doesn't much matter, you just re-install it. The data corruption is maybe a problem if you store data on there that's not reliably backed up. You also don't want to back up corrupt data over good backup data, which is why incremental is important.

I use Samsung Pro SSDs, which I think are single bit per cell, rather than the evo which have multiple bits per cell. The evo has tested as reliable in tests years ago, but they were testing for the disk reporting issues after writing massive volumes of data, rather than testing for data corruption.

I have 120GB SSD for OS and programs, 120GB SSD for data that I need fast (email, caches, etc), then multi TB disks which are ReFS / Storage Spaces. I prefer small OS disks as I take occasional images with Macrium Reflect and I want as little in that as possible - as it is my OS disk is 55GB which is 35GB per image compressed.

The Crucial MX is probably fine. Just some ramblings :)