100% of my QLC drives are now dead.

[iameatingjam]

Can you all stop your anti-QLC circlejerk and USE YOUR BRAINS for 5 seconds?

If QLC NAND was so bad that drives using it were consistently failing at the rate that OP has experienced, do you really think (and this is the part where you need to use your brains) that companies would be selling products using QLC? No, they would not, because they would be haemorrhaging money and customer satisfaction like no tomorrow.

4 dead QLC drives out of 4 dead QLC drives is not an indictment of QLC, it's an indictment of something else. What that is I don't know, but it's almost certainly a problem with the way OP is using or storing these drives. Maybe an NVMe controller is breaking them, maybe they need a firmware update. What I do know is that I, and millions of others, have and use QLC drives without problems, and will continue to do so.

Somebody doesn't have to think that what happened to OP is common or that qlc is the worst thing in the world, to just see that, its not worth the savings. Thats all I think. If tlc was several times more expensive no doubt I would buy it too. Thats just... not what I see.

 

[chrcoluk]

Can you all stop your anti-QLC circlejerk and USE YOUR BRAINS for 5 seconds?

If QLC NAND was so bad that drives using it were consistently failing at the rate that OP has experienced, do you really think (and this is the part where you need to use your brains) that companies would be selling products using QLC? No, they would not, because they would be haemorrhaging money and customer satisfaction like no tomorrow.

4 dead QLC drives out of 4 dead QLC drives is not an indictment of QLC, it's an indictment of something else. What that is I don't know, but it's almost certainly a problem with the way OP is using or storing these drives. Maybe an NVMe controller is breaking them, maybe they need a firmware update. What I do know is that I, and millions of others, have and use QLC drives without problems, and will continue to do so.

My issue with QLC is the bad sides of it are much more than the price differential, in some cases in markets like the UK there is QLC drives that are more expensive than equivalent TLC drives, as an example the recent 2230 QLC SDD that TPU reviewed, costs more than the MP600 mini which is TLC.

For me the max price is probably around 70% for QLC vs TLC, any more then that its not worth even considering.

Of course QLC doesnt save that much % wise for the manufacturers, and hence the problem of it been poor value. Its a margin booster for them.

What the manufacturers likely want to do is have QLC replace old TLC pricing with higher margins, and sell TLC drives for the prices like the MLC 970 PRO used to sell at. That I think was Samsung's aim, when they shuffled TLC into its 980 PRO product but the market didnt play nicely with the plans.

Its all about the margins.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Can you all stop your anti-QLC circlejerk and USE YOUR BRAINS for 5 seconds?

Irony, far out.

4 dead QLC drives out of 4 dead QLC drives is not an indictment of QLC

It is when many, MANY others have had similar experiences.

 

[Assimilator]

My issue with QLC is the bad sides of it are much more than the price differential, in some cases in markets like the UK there is QLC drives that are more expensive than equivalent TLC drives, as an example the recent 2230 QLC SDD that TPU reviewed, costs more than the MP600 mini which is TLC.

For me the max price is probably around 70% for QLC vs TLC, any more then that its not worth even considering.

Of course QLC doesnt save that much % wise for the manufacturers, and hence the problem of it been poor value. Its a margin booster for them.

What the manufacturers likely want to do is have QLC replace old TLC pricing with higher margins, and sell TLC drives for the prices like the MLC 970 PRO used to sell at. That I think was Samsung's aim, when they shuffled TLC into its 980 PRO product but the market didnt play nicely with the plans.

I think thats why they have become obsessed with releasing faster and faster drives (even when they not ready to come to market and its dragging up the cost of motherboards) so they have an excuse to tag a premium price on them, its all about the margins.

None of this I disagree with.

What I do disagree with is that every time QLC is mentioned, there's a knee-jerk reaction of people posting the equivalent of "QLC is bad, TLC is better" and then the anti-QLC circlejerk starts, and any possibly interesting thread involving QLC is invariably derailed by that circlejerk. It's pointless, it's stupid, and I really wish people would just grow the fuck up and stop doing it. Because it sure as hell ain't helping the OP.

 

[Denver]

The NV2 is not reliably TLC, see the TechPowerUp database.

There it says that there is variation in components, not necessarily that TLC is bad. The NV2 is extremely popular and I see few complaints compared to the tens of thousands of units sold.

It seems like it really isn't reliable, there are versions using rubbish QLC. Disgusting.

 

[lexluthermiester]

"QLC is bad, TLC is better"

Yet this is more or less objectively correct as every recent review benchmark tests have proven.

It's pointless, it's stupid, and I really wish people would just grow the fuck up and stop doing it.

Oh gee, more irony.

Because it sure as hell ain't helping the OP.

Nothing is going to help the OP. The drives are dead. Nothing anyone in these forums, or anywhere else on the internet, will say can help them. The purpose of this thread is exclusively about letting everyone know what their experiences have been. It just adds to the already expansive knowledge base of experience with QLC. It is only natural for others to chime in.

 

[R-T-B]

Read what I posted above: it's a different file system. When the OS will se NTFS it will want to update (meta)data on it

You can still mount it under linux. I've done it. I think windows will mount nonsystem too.

 

[Tahagomizer]

The purpose of this thread is exclusively about letting everyone know what their experiences have been. It just adds to the already expansive knowledge base of experience with QLC.

With that being said, here's my QLC drive (660p) after 20000+ hours of typical home use:

 

[SomeOne99h]

I have a question .. Are QLC SSDs more prone to malfunction due to bad DC from powersupply than TLC SSDs?
If I was the OP, I would take my PC to a computer repair shop and ask them to check the powersupply.
It doesn't matter how good a powersupply is, bad things can happen to them even from the beginning because something is faulty somewhere in the powersupply.

With that being said, here's my QLC drive (660p) after 20000+ hours of typical home use:

Go to Function > Advanced Feature > Raw Values > [10] DEC
So the values appear in normal numbers. Easy to read.

 

[bug]

You can still mount it under linux. I've done it. I think windows will mount nonsystem too.

Yes, Linux is smart, it can mount anything in read-only mode. I don't remember seeing that option in Windows. But I didn't look very hard, the option might be in there, somewhere.

 

[Hachi_Roku256563]

as far as im aware this means this drive is QLC
This is my windows boot drive and it has been working flawlessly for 3 years now as of Christmas
35 tbs of host rights aside from the fun little bug of calming its always at an insane temperature maybe its just the usecase?

 

[Shrek]

Yes, Linux is smart, it can mount anything in read-only mode. I don't remember seeing that option in Windows. But I didn't look very hard, the option might be in there, somewhere.

Windows can mount a read only DVD

 

[bug]

Windows can mount a read only DVD

Jesus Christ, can't you tell the difference between a medium that's meant to operate in read-only mode and a NTFS drives that wants to write stuff all the time?
Of course Windows knows how to mount a read-only DVD, the question is, will it mount a NTFS drive in read-only mode? Going by this: https://superuser.com/a/213015 it probably can't, it seems to require writing something to the drive before doing so.

 

[Shrek]

Jesus Christ, can't you tell the difference between a medium that's meant to operate in read-only mode and a NTFS drives that wants to write stuff all the time?
Of course Windows knows how to mount a read-only DVD, the question is, will it mount a NTFS drive in read-only mode? Going by this: https://superuser.com/a/213015 it probably can't, it seems to require writing something to the drive before doing so.

How to mount an NTFS partition read-only in Windows? - Super User
"Now you can mount the volume and it will be read-only"

 

[PapaTaipei]

i own ~10 NVMe SSDs. four of them are QLC Drives.
ALL TLC Drives are 100% fine.
ALL QLC Drives are dead within days to a couple months of light usage. (game installations)
now my last 10 weeks old Crucial P3 Plus 4TB starts to die and is unuseable (games take 15 minutes to load instead of seconds, textures often never load and SMART shows 898 critical errors.)
a failure rate of 100% is insanity... i'll never buy another QLC drive in my life.
View attachment 318904View attachment 318905

What software and games did you installed on them?

 

[Wirko]

How to mount an NTFS partition read-only in Windows? - Super User

"Now you can mount the volume and it will be read-only"

This won't work. If the entire SSD has switched to read-only forever, it means that the partition table is also not writable, and you can't change partition attributes any longer.

 

[sam_86314]

View attachment 319371as far as im aware this means this drive is QLC
This is my windows boot drive and it has been working flawlessly for 3 years now as of Christmas
35 tbs of host rights aside from the fun little bug of calming its always at an insane temperature maybe its just the usecase?

That could also be caused by the folder you copied containing lots of small files. Windows' copy function sucks when it comes to lots of small files, and it'll regularly drop down into the single MB/s if not KB/s.

What is your boot drive?

 

[Wirko]

So let me prove the pudding the British way. I put a SDHC cart into a USB card reader, formatted it to NTFS, copied a couple files to it, extracted it and locked it for writing with the switch. Windows 7 then mounts the card in the reader without any error or warning message but is aware of its read-only state. Options such as Rename, Cut, Paste and Delete are missing from context menus.

There's nothing that makes a SD card fundamentally different from an SSD, so I assume the OS would mount a read-only SSD just the same.

 

[iameatingjam]

I don't like this guy pretending to be the Doctor House of PCs. He seems to want to find a pretext to say that QLC SSDs are not garbage, how audacious to want to blame Crucial's low quality instead.

But seriously, what is the excuse for the existence of QLC, to increase companies' profit margins? TLC SSDs are simply similarly priced and much more reliable.

I wonder if we'll all be using qlc drives in the future. Perhaps the technology will improve and get refined, the downsides will either be addressed or perhaps masked with some kind of cache. I mean its already happened a number of times with ssds. I'm not saying now is a good time to buy qlc, quite the opposite but you never know what will happen in the future. Surely there's going to be demand for higher capacity ssds... I would say at lower prices, but in today market lets be honest, we'll be lucky if the prices don't rise.

 

[bug]

So let me prove the pudding the British way. I put a SDHC cart into a USB card reader, formatted it to NTFS, copied a couple files to it, extracted it and locked it for writing with the switch. Windows 7 then mounts the card in the reader without any error or warning message but is aware of its read-only state. Options such as Rename, Cut, Paste and Delete are missing from context menus.

There's nothing that makes a SD card fundamentally different from an SSD, so I assume the OS would mount a read-only SSD just the same.

Well, devices have associated PID and VID and Windows will treat them differently based on those. Hopefully Windows will do the same for SSDs, but there's still a chance it won't.
Appreciate you taking your time to test that, I wish I thought of it.

 

[Wirko]

I wonder if we'll all be using qlc drives in the future. Perhaps the technology will improve and get refined, the downsides will either be addressed or perhaps masked with some kind of cache. I mean its already happened a number of times with ssds. I'm not saying now is a good time to buy qlc, quite the opposite but you never know what will happen in the future. Surely there's going to be demand for higher capacity ssds... I would say at lower prices, but in today market lets be honest, we'll be lucky if the prices don't rise.

Solidimg makes high capacity enterprise QLC SSDs already - for use cases where density matters a lot. High capacity (up to 60 TB) means that very many flash chips inside the SSD are working in parallel, so write speed should also be great.

 

[Readlight]

use hard drive for game storage.

 

[bug]

Solidimg makes high capacity enterprise QLC SSDs already - for use cases where density matters a lot. High capacity (up to 60 TB) means that very many flash chips inside the SSD are working in parallel, so write speed should also be great.

Density works against adding more bits per cell. As the density increases, the individual cells get smaller. As they get smaller, they hold less electrical charge. As they hold less charge, it gets increasingly harder to distinguish between different charge levels within a cell. So you can end up with a small cell that may work as MLC, but will never work as QLC.
I'm sure makers of enterprise drives know what they're doing, I'm just saying, there's hoops they have to jump through.

 

[AnotherReader]

Density works against adding more bits per cell. As the density increases, the individual cells get smaller. As they get smaller, they hold less electrical charge. As they hold less charge, it gets increasingly harder to distinguish between different charge levels within a cell. So you can end up with a small cell that may work as MLC, but will never work as QLC.
I'm sure makers of enterprise drives know what they're doing, I'm just saying, there's hoops they have to jump through.

They don't increase density by making the cells smaller. Since the invention of 3D NAND, they are increasing the number of layers to increase capacity and as a result, drive endurance has improved since the last days of planar NAND.

 

[caroline!]

Heh. That's why I'm saving for a sweet SLC. My first Intel still works, though it's only 80GB, could work for the OS alone but I keep it as a spare, just in case.