Stick with a Reputable Brand SSD

It’s fairly common for me to receive emails of the form “why shouldn’t I buy Brand X SSD”. After all, SSDs are all the same, right? Hardly. Which is why I stick with proven brands (OWC in my case, but Intel and Samsung and others all have their pluses and minuses with good track records in general).

Flash memory is very expensive, and hence this is the place to cheat. I’ve personally been on the receiving end with counterfeit flash cards, though not as yet with SSDs.

Here’s an interesting story: Kingfast Unknowingly Sends Counterfeit SSD With Fake Memory For Review.

The issue with low-grade flash memory (aka non Tier 1 aka “crap flash”) is that crap flash tends to perform same as the Tier 1 flash at first. But what makes it lower tier is percentage of bad areas and that becomes both a longevity and reliability issue more than a performance one, though lower performance right off the bat is not precluded. In short, a “bargain” SSD might perform well for some period of time, then cause “unpleasant” results after a while.

I asked OWC about how the construct their SSDs:

Unlike many SSD manufacturers, OWC builds consistently with top tier NAND and with NAND configurations that provide the best in class performance for the product offered.

There are different ways to build the same capacity Sync or Async SSD product - and we extensively test and maintain only configs that provide that reliability and consistent performance that one should expect from our OWC products. Where others build with flavor of the week, both performance and reliability can vary rather substantially.