When is the last time you contacted customer care and got useful advice for a product such as hard drives.
I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really be tested.
>Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume.
Is that really true? The likelihood of unrecoverable sector errors goes up as the number of sectors increases.
Reliability is only solid if you have a good backup/recovery plan being practiced. Multiple copies on multiple formats in multiple locations. Original content on SSDs? Make a back up on HDD and/or recordable disc formats. Keep a copy at a friend's/parent's house. Keep a copy in the cloud (Backblaze as an example). If the data is worthy of backing up, do it right.
As for backup that is a vastly unmet need. You have the carbonite scam that is on the rush Limbaugh show (unlimited yeah right) the corporate backup clients that turn home working to not working, and tape drives that cost more than 10 times the size of a drive they can back up, not counting the cost of the tapes, high probability that you pick a bad technology generation of lto, high probability that restore fails, etc.
The computer press has been telling people to back up for years but effective solutions have never been there for the consumer.
A hard drive or SSD is a complex device. Are you going to expect the customer service people help you dump the firmware out that JTAG port? People like that can be trained and equipped with simple diagnostics and remedy options, they can't be expected to get into the fine details of product selection.
I've been having issues with what I suspect is a faulty powerline adapter from TP-Link. I spent over an hour on the phone to them, factory resetting, for them to decide my issue was solved because the status lights were functioning correctly when I moved both adapters to the same extension lead.
There was no option to escalate, continue troubleshooting, nothing. I went back to the Netgear ones I was trying to "upgrade" from.
I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really be tested.