Have internal storage drives gone down in quality?

Question

Call me cynical, but it seems that for every drive I read reviews on, there are loads of people expressing the same issues -- either drops in quality of components, poor longevity, or abnormally high failure rates.

I'm shopping for a second drive to expand my Lenovo Legion 5. My options are M.2 NVMe 2280, 2.5" SATA SSD, or 2.5" SATA HDD.

Starting with the M.2 I struggled to find something that was 1TB or more, with DRAM, and didn't run too hot. Excessive heat (with or without heatsinks) is something I'm really trying to avoid as heat was the suspected killer of my previous machine. Closest I got was Samsung 970 evo, but there are too many reports of heat (something like 50 C idle and 75+ C under load -- no thanks). Hynix P31 also came up, but near impossible to get ahold of where I am.

HDDs are also not looking great with no 1TB+ 2.5" by 7mm drives to be had that are not SMR. This will be a primary/OS drive. I really don't want SMR.

Has anyone been having similar research trouble, or are there any recommendations?

I've been using this so-called "master" SSD spreadsheet which has been somewhat helpful.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcrfpJKHkOf-Oi1DbuuQva2gT4/

Answer 1

for every drive I read reviews on

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-puts-hundreds-businesses-notice-about-fake-reviews-other-misleading-endorsements

https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/why-writing-fake-good-reviews-to-boost-your-business-may-be-illegal-38027

you are being deceived by astroturfing

Has anyone been having similar research trouble

no, because I don't go by reviews that I cannot validate or does not come from a credible source.

Answer 2

In laptops, SSD's generally last longer than hard disks, because if you let the laptop with HDD drop while it's running, head crash, hard disk dead, just lost all your data. With SSD's on the other hand, they can handle some physical load (dropping, tossing, 2.5 SSDs even slamming), meaning that if you drop the laptop, the thing that would be most damaged is the case (thats even without the main benefit of SSD's, your computer is like 4 times faster)

For NVMe SSD's, I personally really like the Kingston A2000, because it's fast, cheap, and has long write endurence (if I recall correctly, 500 cycles). For 2.5In SSD's, the Crucial MX500 is my favorite, since it is also cheap and has okay write endurance, it also is availible with sizes up to 4TB. And forget using hard disks as boot device, even non-SMR drives are way too slow, those are only good for cheap bulk storage