Simple summary for TS.

- If your laptop/ desktop is over 5 years, no need buy expensive SSD.
- If you PC only has SATA cable (desktop) or SATA M.2 (laptop) connection, all SATA SSD speed in this category are 5xxMB/s only. So no need expensive SSD.
- There is nothing wrong buying cheap SSD from brands like Colorful, HkVision, Walram and such.

Basically companies like Kingston, Adata, Sandisk and practically all other companies that does not make their own chips, buy from other chip making companies to make their SSD.

A simple solution to reliability problems is make an over provisioning partition in the SSD. There are many guides for this. Its an option if you need reliability. As proof, if you install Samsung SSD Magician utility, it even has over provisioning option in it. Even Samsung one of the best quality SSD you can buy has this as backup plan.

The only problem i have so far with cheap SSD is the controller. Some of them are weak in a sense that it cannot retain the custom firmware (from the company brand that made it) that was programmed inside and it reverted to controller chip firmware that caused unreadable problems. I have experienced Kingston & Patriot reverting to factory SATAFIRM that caused the SSD to be unreadable. You would probably not have this problem with Samsung, Crucial and Intel.








This post has been edited by netmatrix: Dec 26 2021, 06:38 PM

You CAN buy cheap SATA SSD for regular use or running OS or apps in it. Any brand also can. With or without Dram also can.

But most importantly... MOST IMPORTANTLY once you installed OS or use it, run CrystalDisk Info and see the temperature. Run HWInfo or if your computer BIOS can see HDD/SSD Temp.

If the Temperature starts at 50c, send it back to claim warranty. 100% confirm will fail in less than a year. Throughout many years installing many brands and sizes, the early temperature is one indicator the SSD will not last long.

The other one that you cannot detect is SSD controller failure. That one really based on luck. Phison brand controllers are the most common for cheap SSD. Last year i have experienced Kingston 240GB A400 & Patriot 240GB with Phison controllers that failed in under a year before.