DO NOT BUY WD SSDs

[Ciuwas]

I recently picked up a SA510 WD 500GB for a startup drive and I thought it was doing well untill it started absolutely crapping itself. Now the drive is unusable as it takes 10 minutes to boot up windows and even during the install of windows it proved to be extremely show. I’m not sure if this is because it is DRAMless? but wow, I knew Linus warned about DRAMless drives but I never knew it was this bad.

[FI Fheonix]

2 minutes ago, Ciuwas said:

I recently picked up a SA510 WD 500GB for a startup drive and I thought it was doing well untill it started absolutely crapping itself. Now the drive is unusable as it takes 10 minutes to boot up windows and even during the install of windows it proved to be extremely show. I’m not sure if this is because it is DRAMless? but wow, I knew Linus warned about DRAMless drives but I never knew it was this bad.

Do you have a warranty?

[Middcore]

You can find someone with an anecdotal horror story about every brand.

 

If you have a warranty, avail yourself of it.

[Qyygle]

The SA510 is a SATA 2.5" SSD. It's basically a drop in replacement for a HDD, and is limited to the SATA interface to begin with.

Even then, 10 minutes for a windows boot seems to say something else is wrong with your install.

 

Short of the drive itself being defective, it seems pretty likely you may want to do some more bug-fixing on your machine. You haven't completely filled it by any chance? SSDs runs slower and slower, especially without DRAM, the more they're full. If you're completely sure it's not your install, like the other said just use the warranty...

[Ciuwas]

13 minutes ago, FI Fheonix said:

Do you have a warranty?

Yeah it’s warranty time

[Ciuwas]

1 minute ago, Qyygle said:

The SA510 is a SATA 2.5" SSD. It's basically a drop in replacement for a HDD, and is limited to the SATA interface to begin with.

Even then, 10 minutes for a windows boot seems to say something else is wrong with your install.

 

Short of the drive itself being defective, it seems pretty likely you may want to do some more bug-fixing on your machine. You haven't completely filled it by any chance? SSDs runs slower and slower, especially without DRAM, the more they're full. If you're completely sure it's not your install, like the other said just use the warranty...

Don’t worry I tested for corrupted files before wiping the drive and reinstalling a couple times before. Straight up idk what happened

[Uttamattamakin]

1 minute ago, Qyygle said:

The SA510 is a SATA 2.5" SSD. It's basically a drop in replacement for a HDD, and is limited to the SATA interface to begin with.

Even then, 10 minutes for a windows boot seems to say something else is wrong with your install.

 

Short of the drive itself being defective, it seems pretty likely you may want to do some more bug-fixing on your machine. You haven't completely filled it by any chance? SSDs runs slower and slower, especially without DRAM, the more they're full. If you're completely sure it's not your install, like the other said just use the warranty...

Along these lines

What I have done in the past to diagnose something as being a software VS hardware issue is install a different OS.  When I used to dual boot Linux and Windows if an issue existed in one OS but not the other it was a problem with software.  IF an issue existed in both it was probably hardware.  Backup your data.  Try installing Linux if you use windows or vice versa and see if the "hardware issue" still exist. 

Then warranty time if it does. 

[P e r s e p h o n e]

50 minutes ago, Middcore said:

You can find someone with an anecdotal horror story about every brand.

 

If you have a warranty, avail yourself of it.

This so much.

 

You can really only worry about the statistical averages of each manufacturer. Puget did a study a while ago and found Samsung & Intel to be the best. That said we've recently had a little Samsung scandal with their drive firmware wearing out the drive alarmingly fast. Just updated my 980 Pros and found one of them did wear a lot more than the others and had older firmware. Though it hardly still makes a difference in the grand scheme of things.

[PDifolco]

38 minutes ago, Ciuwas said:

I recently picked up a SA510 WD 500GB for a startup drive and I thought it was doing well untill it started absolutely crapping itself. Now the drive is unusable as it takes 10 minutes to boot up windows and even during the install of windows it proved to be extremely show. I’m not sure if this is because it is DRAMless? but wow, I knew Linus warned about DRAMless drives but I never knew it was this bad.

Ok so you have a defective drive, RMA it, don't p*ss on WD for that, they make excellent drives overall

[Ripred]

41 minutes ago, Ciuwas said:

I recently picked up a SA510 WD 500GB for a startup drive and I thought it was doing well untill it started absolutely crapping itself. Now the drive is unusable as it takes 10 minutes to boot up windows and even during the install of windows it proved to be extremely show. I’m not sure if this is because it is DRAMless? but wow, I knew Linus warned about DRAMless drives but I never knew it was this bad.

My SN550 is dramless and its fine, just RMA it WD is pretty reasonable

[GuiltySpark_]

My three DRAMless SN770s are fine. This is hysteria for the sake of hysteria. Then again DRAMless SATA drives can be quite bad if pushed. NVMe doesn’t suffer this with the addition of HMB. 

[Holmes108]

12 minutes ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

My three DRAMless SN770s are fine. This is hysteria for the sake of hysteria. Then again DRAMless SATA drives can be quite bad if pushed. NVMe doesn’t suffer this with the addition of HMB. 

 

Same, have an SN770 and an SN570 and they've both been great. No DRAM, no problem!

 

[manikyath]

duds happen. instead of wasting your energy about how this brand has no right to exist.. you could have contacted the seller, already have a replacement on it's way, and you could come im here talking about how great your retailer of choice is instead.

 

also, i've got a small army of kingston A400 drives (which iirc are dramless), and they're all doing great.

[Nisco3000]

Just the classic, person buys a DOA product and claims murder and fire.
Don't people know that tech some times comes broken out of the box?

Hope he learned the valuable lesson to just use your warranty claim before yelling into the ether.

[Godlygamer23]

Pretty much what everyone said - however, I'd also like to add this from a manufacturer's perspective. While the amount of items my workplace manufacturers is fairly small, and we make sure that everything passes all of our validation tests, we still get RMAs from our customers. It happens, and that doesn't mean the product is bad. There are so many factors that go into manufacturing electronics, and I imagine WD tests all of their products to ensure compliance with their own requirements, but the individual components might have defects that only show up over time - a latent defect. Every component within an electronic assembly is complex, including the PCB that everything mounts to.

[Needfuldoer]

On 3/13/2023 at 12:52 PM, Middcore said:

You can find someone with an anecdotal horror story about every brand.

Yup.

 

This is why a 1-2-3 backup strategy is important no matter what brand and type of drive you use.