Are Western Digital drives just not as good as they used to be? (WD Black SN750 m.2 failure)

[pjstar35]

So, I've been using Western Digital drives, specifically the Black version, since way back in the day when only mechanical HDDs existed, and they were always great drives with a good reputation.  Fast forward to now and I just had a WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD fail.  I believe this is the first drive that I've had fail on me in over 30 years of building/using computers.  I bought the SN750 in April of 2020 and it failed on me last Sunday (5/19/2024) so it only survived 4 years and was used as a 2nd drive.  My primary drive that holds my OS on it is an old Kingston 2.5" SSD that's something like 200gb and has been a trucking for over 10 years now.  Has the quality of WD drives gone downhill or did I just get unlucky?  I'm a little concerned because I bought an identical drive about a year later, in March of 2021, to run a RAID 0 configuration so I could double my capacity and increase performance and this drive is now my sole secondary drive until I buy a new one.  

[Ottoman420]

if it lasted 4 years i would call it unlucky rather than anything else.

 

All my WD drives are still good.

[podkall]

Drive health/longevity doesn't only depend on quality and length of time it has been running.

 

Your 200GB OS drive might be running for 10 years, but what kind of work is it doing? It's just reading files to make the OS work, reading files on SSD brings basically 0 wear, it's when you write data that it starts to wear down the SSD.

 

If the spot where SSD tries to write on has been written on previously, it needs to delete that data or rewrite it into new data, which wears down those specific cells.

 

These cells can be rewritten several times depending on their type, but not forever.

 

19 minutes ago, pjstar35 said:

Has the quality of WD drives gone downhill or did I just get unlucky?

you might have gotten unlucky,

 

to check for drive health, there's a helpful tool that checks for that, it reads bunch of data but also has a simple display that tells you the health of a drive by %

 

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

 

program's called CrystalDiskInfo

[Motifator]

WD has their own suite too, might be worth checking from.

[pjstar35]

1 hour ago, podkall said:

Drive health/longevity doesn't only depend on quality and length of time it has been running.

 

Your 200GB OS drive might be running for 10 years, but what kind of work is it doing? It's just reading files to make the OS work, reading files on SSD brings basically 0 wear, it's when you write data that it starts to wear down the SSD.

 

If the spot where SSD tries to write on has been written on previously, it needs to delete that data or rewrite it into new data, which wears down those specific cells.

 

These cells can be rewritten several times depending on their type, but not forever.

 

you might have gotten unlucky,

 

to check for drive health, there's a helpful tool that checks for that, it reads bunch of data but also has a simple display that tells you the health of a drive by %

 

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

 

program's called CrystalDiskInfo

 

I checked the health of all my drives not all that long ago and none of them were below 90%.  Of course, now the drive is dead so I can't check anything, but I just can't imagine the health of the drive dropping that fast from normal usage so I'm leaning towards "unlucky".  I guess I'll check the other drive when I get home and see what the health of it is.  It's been performing the same tasks as the dead drive for about 75% of the time so I think the health of that drive might give me a better idea of whether it was unlucky or just bad drives.  

[Kilrah]

Looks like a sudden failure, those happen and the health checkers won't be able to predict them.

[johnt]

Happens all the time. There is no perfect hard drive. I’ve had zero drive failures in my entire life and in the past month I’ve witnessed two from WD (one red, one purple). My greens, blues, and blacks are all still going. I mean you can try Seagate but they fail too lol It happens to everybody.

[Blue4130]

Your first drive to fail in 30 years. And it failed after 4 years. That isn't unlucky or lucky, that is just the nature of drives.

[Lurking]

8 hours ago, pjstar35 said:

So, I've been using Western Digital drives, specifically the Black version, since way back in the day when only mechanical HDDs existed, and they were always great drives with a good reputation.  Fast forward to now and I just had a WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD fail.  I believe this is the first drive that I've had fail on me in over 30 years of building/using computers.  I bought the SN750 in April of 2020 and it failed on me last Sunday (5/19/2024) so it only survived 4 years and was used as a 2nd drive.  My primary drive that holds my OS on it is an old Kingston 2.5" SSD that's something like 200gb and has been a trucking for over 10 years now.  Has the quality of WD drives gone downhill or did I just get unlucky?  I'm a little concerned because I bought an identical drive about a year later, in March of 2021, to run a RAID 0 configuration so I could double my capacity and increase performance and this drive is now my sole secondary drive until I buy a new one.  

A company with good experience in HDD still had to start from scratch when starting with SSD. There is almost no HDD expertise that transfers to SSD. So the fact they had good HDD means nothing for SSD.

 

4 years sounds bad, but we don't know temperatures and use. 

 

Does WD even make their SSD, or do they just relabel SSD? If you want to be extremely conservative like me, buy SSD from actual chip manufacturers like Samsung that are vertically integrated. And buy a model that has been on the market for a year. I don't know if that actually is necessary, but makes me feel better.

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, Lurking said:

A company with good experience in HDD still had to start from scratch when starting with SSD. There is almost no HDD expertise that transfers to SSD. So the fact they had good HDD means nothing for SSD.

 

4 years sounds bad, but we don't know temperatures and use. 

 

Does WD even make their SSD, or do they just relabel SSD? If you want to be extremely conservative like me, buy SSD from actual chip manufacturers like Samsung that are vertically integrated. And buy a model that has been on the market for a year. I don't know if that actually is necessary, but makes me feel better.

Start from scratch? Hardly...

https://investor.wdc.com/news-releases/news-release-details/western-digital-acquisition-sandisk-receives-approval-chinas

 And a list of other...

ACQUISITIONS

• 1986: ADSI (SCSI controller chips);
• 1987: Faraday Electronics Inc. (core logic chipsets)
• 1988: hard drive production assets of Tandon;
• 2007: Komag (Hard disk media);
• 2012: HGST (HDD, SSD);
• January 2013: Arkeia Software (Backup Software);           
• September 2013: sTec (SSD);
• October 2013: Virident (SSD, system and software)
• 2014: Skyera (Flash-storage arrays);
• 2015: Amplidata (Software);
• 2016: SanDisk (SSD, system and software, NAND flash, embedded);
• 2017: Upthere (Flash, persistent, cloud services);
• 2018: Wearable, Inc.;
• 2019: Kazan Networks (Flash storage technology).

They had plenty of help with making SSD's. They didn't start from zero.

 

[Lurking]

17 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

Start from scratch? Hardly...

https://investor.wdc.com/news-releases/news-release-details/western-digital-acquisition-sandisk-receives-approval-chinas

 And a list of other...

ACQUISITIONS

• 1986: ADSI (SCSI controller chips);
• 1987: Faraday Electronics Inc. (core logic chipsets)
• 1988: hard drive production assets of Tandon;
• 2007: Komag (Hard disk media);
• 2012: HGST (HDD, SSD);
• January 2013: Arkeia Software (Backup Software);           
• September 2013: sTec (SSD);
• October 2013: Virident (SSD, system and software)
• 2014: Skyera (Flash-storage arrays);
• 2015: Amplidata (Software);
• 2016: SanDisk (SSD, system and software, NAND flash, embedded);
• 2017: Upthere (Flash, persistent, cloud services);
• 2018: Wearable, Inc.;
• 2019: Kazan Networks (Flash storage technology).

They had plenty of help with making SSD's. They didn't start from zero.

 

They first collaborated with SanDisk to make SSD, (=relabelled?) then acquired SanDisk. 

 

So they basically had to buy an SSD company since their HDD knowledge alone didn't give enough expertise for SSD.  Maybe "from scratch" was a poor choice of words. But WD basically had not much and had to buy an SSD company. If they didn't, you could buy San Disc labelled SSD and they would be equally as good or bad.

 

So if you want to judge if WD makes good SSD, you should look at San Disk track record, and not WD's track record with HDD. I have no idea if SanDisk Were good or not. I know my WD and HGST HDD were rock solid, but that is not relevant to SSD. And whoever invented the "Green" HDD should be punished. Maybe it saves 1W, but you have to run the PC for additional hours to work with it 

[freeagent]

Been using WD SSD since they started selling them, no problems to report.

 

I do have SN 750 500 and 1TB drives drives running in my sons system, I bought them new 4 years ago, and the system is only shut down for maintenance.

 

I am happy with them.

 

I have lost 4 Raptors though.

[Blue4130]

8 hours ago, Lurking said:

 

So if you want to judge if WD makes good SSD, you should look at San Disk track record, and not WD's track record with HDD. I have no idea if SanDisk Were good or not. I know my WD and HGST HDD were rock solid, but that is not relevant to SSD. And whoever invented the "Green" HDD should be punished. Maybe it saves 1W, but you have to run the PC for additional hours to work with it 

No you shouldn't. SSD tech has advanced greatly since they bought Sandisk in 2016 or HGST in 2012. They have been keeping up with current tech trends, not just relying on Sandisk's tech from 2016. Judge them on a case by case (model by model basis). Just look at samsung. They have amazing ssd's but then they also have hot trash.

[Lurking]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

No you shouldn't. SSD tech has advanced greatly since they bought Sandisk in 2016 or HGST in 2012. They have been keeping up with current tech trends, not just relying on Sandisk's tech from 2016. Judge them on a case by case (model by model basis). Just look at samsung. They have amazing ssd's but then they also have hot trash.

That's true. Ultimately looking at the last 3 years or so matters.

 

But looking at WD HDD reliability is even more wrong.