> Anyway, gave me a talking point going forward to really, really press management on "it's worth paying for drives from 3-4x brands and maybe splurging for higher rated vs consumer too", but also does made me wonder if there is something going on, or was (pandemic related?), at Samsung's storage division.
What's going on at Samsung is the same thing that's always been going on at Samsung: they use their own flash and their own controllers and they have their own sets of problems as a result. It was a selling point in the early days of Sandforce and other turds (leading to things like the OCZ Vertex series) but now the commodity market has caught up and Samsung doing their own thing is kind of a negative. Like yeah it's fine as long as they don't screw up, but they're screwing up a lot more than they used to.
I don't see any direct correlation between the various failures that have occurred over the years. 840 Evo had something wrong with the flash NANDs that caused them to lose charge over time (leading to data loss) so they put out a new firmware that would just continuously write the flash in a tape-loop sort of deal (lol) to avoid the data ever aging out. I don't count that as a controller flaw, that's a flash flaw that was fixed with a firmware patch.
870 Evo, 970 Evo, 970 Evo Plus, and 980 have all been accused of having problems over the years, in addition to the 980 Pro and now 990 Pro, but there's actually a pretty good variety of controller models as well as different flash types (from 64-layer to 236-layer) there. It's hard to know how much firmware they all share though... or whether it was more flash problems in certain batches, or what. But overall Samsung certainly has had a lot of failures in recent years and I think it all really comes back to the fact that they're using their own controllers and their own flash, while everyone else is pretty much commodity at this point... meaning they get their own bugs too.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcr...