DrKK
FreeNAS Generalissimo
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2013
- Messages
- 3,630
Esteemed Community:
My whole life (ok, well, for about ten years) I have bought Kingston, almost exclusively. Kingston thumb drives, Kingston memory, Kingston SSD's. And so on.
Today is 21 January 2015, and that ends today. I don't know what's going on over there at Kingston in recent times, and I have been wondering if maybe I've been unlucky. But I really don't think so. Let me explain to you what has been happening for the past couple of months, because as you guys know, I build a lot of boxes for associates, myself, and so on.
I have purchased seven Kingston Micro DT drives (16 GB mostly) (what we used to recommend for FreeNAS). ALL SEVEN, you heard me right folks, ***ALL SEVEN*** began throwing serious errors within the first 4 weeks of usage. The last holdout died this morning. (Thank god for the self-healing filing system we have on boot now). An admittedly small sample size, but a 100% failure rate. These were sourced from Amazon (itself---not third party sellers), Best Buy, and Newegg, in three different purchases, so the sourcing was diverse, and from retailers that would not have counterfeits in their supply chain.
In that same period, I have purchased six Sandisk Cruzer Fit thumb drives (16 GB mostly). These are in the same use, in the same type of systems, right down to the hardware. Not a single one of these, **NOT A SINGLE ONE** has ever thrown a single error, corrupted a single bit, or otherwise been a problem. An admittedly small sample size, but a 0% failure rate. These too were sourced from a combination of reliable vendors, in a combination of buys.
On top of this, some of the schenangians that have been happening on SSD's, the recent wtf's with the 8GB ECC DIMMs, and so on? Yeah, I'm officially done giving them the benefit of the doubt. This Kingston fanboy now spends the extra $1, and buys Sandisk. I know the flash memory business can have razor-edge margins, and there's a lot of incentive to squeeze down the unit cost. But it doesn't matter what it costs if I can't sleep at night with it in my servers.
That's just my opinion, and my observations. You can evaluate for yourself if you think I'm worth listening to. I know, and expect, and encourage that Kingston fascists will reply viciously to this thread. I'm all for it. Let's have the discussion.
That is all. My boot devices for non-DOMmed FreeNAS boxes, from this point forward, until something changes, will be whatever Sandisk's small form factor USB drives are.
This is the device I recommend.
Any device with the word "Kingston" on it, I do not recommend, until further notice.
My whole life (ok, well, for about ten years) I have bought Kingston, almost exclusively. Kingston thumb drives, Kingston memory, Kingston SSD's. And so on.
Today is 21 January 2015, and that ends today. I don't know what's going on over there at Kingston in recent times, and I have been wondering if maybe I've been unlucky. But I really don't think so. Let me explain to you what has been happening for the past couple of months, because as you guys know, I build a lot of boxes for associates, myself, and so on.
I have purchased seven Kingston Micro DT drives (16 GB mostly) (what we used to recommend for FreeNAS). ALL SEVEN, you heard me right folks, ***ALL SEVEN*** began throwing serious errors within the first 4 weeks of usage. The last holdout died this morning. (Thank god for the self-healing filing system we have on boot now). An admittedly small sample size, but a 100% failure rate. These were sourced from Amazon (itself---not third party sellers), Best Buy, and Newegg, in three different purchases, so the sourcing was diverse, and from retailers that would not have counterfeits in their supply chain.
In that same period, I have purchased six Sandisk Cruzer Fit thumb drives (16 GB mostly). These are in the same use, in the same type of systems, right down to the hardware. Not a single one of these, **NOT A SINGLE ONE** has ever thrown a single error, corrupted a single bit, or otherwise been a problem. An admittedly small sample size, but a 0% failure rate. These too were sourced from a combination of reliable vendors, in a combination of buys.
On top of this, some of the schenangians that have been happening on SSD's, the recent wtf's with the 8GB ECC DIMMs, and so on? Yeah, I'm officially done giving them the benefit of the doubt. This Kingston fanboy now spends the extra $1, and buys Sandisk. I know the flash memory business can have razor-edge margins, and there's a lot of incentive to squeeze down the unit cost. But it doesn't matter what it costs if I can't sleep at night with it in my servers.
That's just my opinion, and my observations. You can evaluate for yourself if you think I'm worth listening to. I know, and expect, and encourage that Kingston fascists will reply viciously to this thread. I'm all for it. Let's have the discussion.
That is all. My boot devices for non-DOMmed FreeNAS boxes, from this point forward, until something changes, will be whatever Sandisk's small form factor USB drives are.
This is the device I recommend.
Any device with the word "Kingston" on it, I do not recommend, until further notice.
(even if my system is running from a year now without an issue).
