100% of my QLC drives are now dead.

GerKNG · Oct 25, 2023

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.

Wirko · Oct 25, 2023

Did you buy all four knowing they were QLC or was any of them an example of bait-and-switch?

GerKNG · Oct 25, 2023

I bought them on purpose as game drives in a laptop and two desktops.

Denver · Oct 25, 2023

I always say that buying QLC SSDs is the same as picking up manure with your bare hands.
My condolences. :cool:

Ps; As a consolation note, you can still use the warranty and get new SSDs, sell them to someone to suffer in your place and buy beautiful TLC or even MLC SSDs like those Samsung sata 860 etc... zero losses. :rolleyes:

faye · Oct 25, 2023

I mean, the P3 drives are junk, but "all QLC drives are bad" is quite a statement... if it were that widespread an issue I imagine we'd have a lot more threads about it.

bug · Oct 25, 2023

faye said:
I mean, the P3 drives are junk, but "all QLC drives are bad" is quite a statement... if it were that widespread an issue I imagine we'd have a lot more threads about it.

While I agree they can't be that bad, nothing proves they're a pretty poor solution than the fact nobody in the industry dares talk about bringing PLC to the market.
Plus, they're not cheap enough to be worth purchasing over a much more resilient TLC drive.

A Computer Guy · Oct 25, 2023

GerKNG said:
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 318904 View attachment 318905

Out of curiosity have you tried to secure erase them and see if they come back to life?

Shihab · Oct 25, 2023

GerKNG said:
ALL QLC Drives are dead within days to a couple months of light usage. (game installations)

That's way outside the bathtub for all consumer electronics, not just QLC flash.
Either you are extremely unlucky, have something wrong with your setup that is killing those drives, or need to find a new place to buy your parts from.

bug · Oct 25, 2023

Shihab said:
That's way outside the bathtub for all consumer electronics, not just QLC flash.
Either you are extremely unlucky, have something wrong with your setup that is killing those drives, or need to find a new place to buy your parts from.

He does mention all his TLC drives are fine... But yeah, extremely unlucky, whatever the cause.

3DVCash · Oct 25, 2023

Shihab said:
That's way outside the bathtub for all consumer electronics, not just QLC flash.
Either you are extremely unlucky, have something wrong with your setup that is killing those drives, or need to find a new place to buy your parts from.

I'm not sure I've ever seen an avatar more perfectly suited to a post. :laugh:

GerKNG · Oct 25, 2023

Shihab said:
That's way outside the bathtub for all consumer electronics, not just QLC flash.
Either you are extremely unlucky, have something wrong with your setup that is killing those drives, or need to find a new place to buy your parts from.

the first P3 died almost imediately (was in a laptop running windows, next morning = no boot device.
the second one in a laptop had tons of critical errors after a couple months.
the third (P3 Plus 2TB) BSOD'd while gaming and was no longer recognized.

i have two MP600, P5 and P5 Plus more than 5 MX500s, 870 EVOs, 970 Evo Plus old and new model, four SN850X they are all good and run for years without issues.

faye said:
but "all QLC drives are bad" is quite a statement.

i never said that ?

Wirko · Oct 25, 2023

GerKNG said:
the first P3 died almost imediately (was in a laptop running windows, next morning = no boot device.
the second one in a laptop had tons of critical errors after a couple months.
the third (P3 Plus 2TB) BSOD'd while gaming and was no longer recognized.

So not just 100% dead but also 100% unwilling to fail gracefully and switch to read-only mode...

GerKNG · Oct 25, 2023

i checked amazon:
970 Evo Plus (2x) TLC
Crucial MX500 (6x) TLC
Corsair MP600 (2x) TLC
Corsair MP600 Pro (1x) TLC
Samsung 870 QVO (2x) QLC
Samsung 870 EVO (3x)
Sandisk Ultra 3D (1x) TLC
Sandisk Plus (1x) low end MLC from half a decade ago
Intenso TOP (2x) dirt cheap TLC crap
WD SN850X (3x) TLC
Crucial P5 (1x) TLC
Crucial P5 Plus (1x) TLC
Crucial P3 (2x) QLC
Crucial P3 Plus (2x) QLC
everything QLC except of one QVO which landed in a friends PS4 and not in my PC has been returned because it was defective.
every single TLC Drive even from 2017 is fully functional.

unlucky is a statement... it's a lottery jackpot of unluck.

Wirko said:
So not just 100% dead but also 100% unwilling to fail gracefully and switch to read-only mode...

yeah...

i am trying to get some files off the drive but it does not even read properly... it takes 30 seconds to even start copying files now and then gets stuck at 0MB/s.

Wirko · Oct 25, 2023

Amazon also has dirt cheap TLC SSDs called Fikwot, which is a name that you can't not notice, but can't be found outside Amazon. Possibly their own brand. I may buy a cheap sample of those, or an Intenso TLC, for a burn test.

LabRat 891 · Oct 25, 2023

Question:
is/are QLC more-sensitive to thermals, voltage changes, transients, etc. than TLC drives?
(The lil 'sleeve' on Steam Deck drives seems to be a bidirectional shield; maybe WiFi/LTE/5G modem related?)
Other than poor cooling, a laptop should not be killing drives like this.
(Laptop' 3.3V rail on the fritz?)

I've managed to have killed 3 NVME drives:
1. I accidentally kneeled on one, and broke into two pieces.
2. I shorted out surface-mount components on a 16GB M10 Optane, using thermal spreader.
3. I cooked a PM963 960GB 'server' NVME, installing and playing Unity Engine game(s) off it, while 'naked' and plugged into a USB bridge (known to run drives hot).

So, the only time I've seen anything like this, was thermal/voltage related...

faye · Oct 25, 2023

GerKNG said:
the first P3 died almost imediately (was in a laptop running windows, next morning = no boot device.
the second one in a laptop had tons of critical errors after a couple months.
the third (P3 Plus 2TB) BSOD'd while gaming and was no longer recognized.

i have two MP600, P5 and P5 Plus more than 5 MX500s, 870 EVOs, 970 Evo Plus old and new model, four SN850X they are all good and run for years without issues.

i never said that ?

You didn't say it, but it was strongly implied. "All my QLC drives are dead" and "all these other (non-QLC) drives are fine" - that's barely reading between the lines.

Still, it's good to know the P3s are just as bad as I imagined them to be. Hopefully I won't have similar issues long term with my Intel 670p drives. I have 3, the oldest of which is going on like 4 years now?

AnotherReader · Oct 25, 2023

faye said:
You didn't say it, but it was strongly implied. "All my QLC drives are dead" and "all these other (non-QLC) drives are fine" - that's barely reading between the lines.

Still, it's good to know the P3s are just as bad as I imagined them to be. Hopefully I won't have similar issues long term with my Intel 670p drives. I have 3, the oldest of which is going on like 4 years now?

I have had 2 of Intel's QLC drives of which the oldest is 6 years old and it's still doing fine. This sounds like really bad luck.

GerKNG · Oct 25, 2023

faye said:
You didn't say it, but it was strongly implied. "All my QLC drives are dead" and "all these other (non-QLC) drives are fine" - that's barely reading between the lines.

well because out of my 20+ drives (2,5" and M.2) all QLC drives are dead and all others are not.
that's not implying stuff and hiding secret messages between the lines... it's just what happened.

LabRat 891 · Oct 25, 2023

GerKNG said:
well because out of my 20+ drives (2,5" and M.2) all QLC drives are dead and all others are not.
that's not implying stuff and hiding secret messages between the lines... it's just what happened.

There's clearly some common factor amongst ~~your~~ QLC drives that's lending them towards extraordinarily short lives (in your usage).
You're not BSing but, neither is much-anyone grasping how unusual that is, or asking "Why?".

You have established a pattern, not one or 2 anecdotal failures but, a pattern of QLC drives failing prematurely.

QED.
99.0% remaining health/writes, yet a warning is flagged, and the drive effectively-inoperable.

In my limited-experience opinion:
These QLC units (specifically, in your possession and use) are either doing tons of internal re-writes / error-correction and/or are overheating chronically.
Please note: I'm not making accusations of you doing anything wrong; rather, trying to drill down to a defect or failure in the machine these are dying in.
This is abnormal, even within the known issues with QLC drives.

A Computer Guy · Oct 25, 2023

faye said:
You didn't say it, but it was strongly implied. "All my QLC drives are dead" and "all these other (non-QLC) drives are fine" - that's barely reading between the lines.

Still, it's good to know the P3s are just as bad as I imagined them to be. Hopefully I won't have similar issues long term with my Intel 670p drives. I have 3, the oldest of which is going on like 4 years now?

I still have several P1's that are working fine (didn't realize they were QLC when I got them) but I had to replace them for performance reasons. Used them in my gaming PC for over a year. 1 for OS , 1 for steam storage.

bug · Oct 25, 2023

Wirko said:
So not just 100% dead but also 100% unwilling to fail gracefully and switch to read-only mode...

Switch to read-only mode is useless for home users. Any modern file system will want to record last access date and metadata like that, thus the drive will fail to mount in read-only mode. It is only useful for professionals that will retrieve your data. For a price.

Denver · Oct 25, 2023

LabRat 891 said:
There's clearly some common factor amongst ~~your~~ QLC drives that's lending them towards extraordinarily short lives (in your usage).
You're not BSing but, neither is much-anyone grasping how unusual that is, or asking "Why?".

You have established a pattern, not one or 2 anecdotal failures but, a pattern of QLC drives failing prematurely.
View attachment 318935QED.
99.0% remaining health/writes, yet a warning is flagged, and the drive effectively-inoperable.

In my limited-experience opinion:
These QLC units (specifically, in your possession and use) are either doing tons of internal re-writes / error-correction and/or are overheating chronically.
Please note: I'm not making accusations of you doing anything wrong; rather, trying to drill down to a defect or failure in the machine these are dying in.
This is abnormal, even within the known issues with QLC drives.

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.

A Computer Guy · Oct 25, 2023

Denver said:
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.

QLC = lower cost higher capacity NAND storage in the consumer space.

Ahhzz · Oct 25, 2023

Guys, keep it civil, keep it controlled. Provide opinions, don't present something as fact without sources, and try not to get the thread locked.

sam_86314 · Oct 26, 2023

Glad I've returned both QLC drives I've ever (knowingly) purchased.

With the first one (1TB Crucial P3), I just had doubts about its longevity, and an MX500 wasn't far off in price. The second one (4TB Fanxiang S660, virtually identical to the 4TB P3 Plus) had very poor sequential performance, a problem for a drive I'd use to transfer large files between computers.

Both drives, I learned they were QLC after buying them. The S660 stung the most because the 2TB version of that drive is TLC-based and performs very well.

Wouldn't it be nice if manufacturers were required to list the type of NAND they use?

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100% of my QLC drives are now dead.

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