Warning: problems with Silicon Power products (SSDs, flash drives, etc)

[dogememe]

Over the years I have purchased many of their products. RAM, flash drives, SSDs, etc.

I knew going in that it wasn't top-notch stuff but I always considered it decent. Over the years I had a couple of the flash drives die eventually but I use them heavily so it's to be expected. No issues with any of the RAM or their other SSDs although I never used their drives in anything heavily used or important because, well, they're cheap.

But a few months ago I had a 4TB SSD from them start to have issues after only a few months in service.

SMART data as per CrystalDiskInfo was fine but some the files were simply not readable. Using a different SMART software did show some errors. So I took it out of service, wrote off the data as lost because it was just movies, and attempted to RMA it.

I went on their website and tried to create an account to do a RMA. It simply didn't work. So I went on their general contact form and attempted to send them a message and forgot about it. Well I saw the bad drive floating around and decided to try again.

Attempting to create an account on their RMA portal is a joke. It asks for stuff that doesn't matter like "birthday" and "gender" while you can't even use special characters in the password. Yes, I'll say that again... you can't use anything letters and numbers. Now THAT is dumb.

Regardless, I tried creating an account again... it gave me some errors in what looks to be Chinese. I asked Grok for help and apparently it is a success, check email for verification message.

Well guess what never came? Not in the spam folder, not anywhere. But OK, it's my own .ai email... maybe their stupid system doesn't work with that. So I tried again, this time with a Gmail. And... nothing.

So I hit the big Customer Support icon that was floating around their website. That led me to Facebook Messenger. And I sent them a message. Well, I got an auto-reply that they are currently closed. It's 10AM on a weekday... they should be open. But in their message it gives what time they are open and the timezone. I looked up the timezone and apparently if we translate it to my time zone (I'm in California) they are open from 6:30PM to 3:30AM pacific time. Like WHAT!!!! You sell stuff in the US and are a fairly well known brand all over US websites like Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, Microcenter, etc. but you only offer customer support while we're asleep?

I suspect when/if I finally do get ahold of someone they're going to give me a runaround because the SSD that I originally paid $179 is now selling for about double that... so we'll see.

But long story short I will NEVER buy any of their stuff again. EVER. And I suggest you do the same.

 

[walterjay]

What you are experiencing is known as sludge. It is maddening.

 

[TheOilWizard]

You could get charged a depreciation fee on the RMA, too. But this poster also shared your frustration with the RMA process.

 

[rijndael]

I've really tried to avoid these budget flash vendors. I typically only buy SK Hynix or Samsung drives, even though they're more expensive.

 

[dogememe]

You could get charged a depreciation fee on the RMA, too. But this poster also shared your frustration with the RMA process.

That's crazy. if anything there should be an APPRECIATION fee haha.

 

[JavierH19]

The whole computer parts thing is crazy right now. Good thing my computer is still good enough to keep using until it calms down and i can upgrade. It's only 7-8 years old but has an ssd which makes all the difference and i'm not a heavy user.

 

[PandaBear]

A lot of these smaller brands are just putting their labels on another company's production. There aren't too many of them with real R&D. Having said that charging depreciation fee is a new low. They could have just send you a used unit they rescanned for bad blocks instead, it is not really hard to do if they have diagnostic software from in-house. This reminds me of OCZ before they went belly up. Rumor in Taiwan said those guys were out of money at one point buying wafers instead of tested chips and in the end couldn't get the testing done right, and send out a lot of drives without testing and they all end up bad in the later productions, and the company went out of business. I think it seems like Silicon Power is heading down the same path.

Even A-DATA doesn't do that.

 

[Urshurak776]

I had a silicone power SSD (2.5") fail with just moderate use. They actually sent me a new one, even though it was slightly out of warranty. I have had good luck with their memory modules and m.2 NVME SSD's.

 

[dogememe]

A lot of these smaller brands are just putting their labels on another company's production. There aren't too many of them with real R&D. Having said that charging depreciation fee is a new low. They could have just send you a used unit they rescanned for bad blocks instead, it is not really hard to do if they have diagnostic software from in-house. This reminds me of OCZ before they went belly up. Rumor in Taiwan said those guys were out of money at one point buying wafers instead of tested chips and in the end couldn't get the testing done right, and send out a lot of drives without testing and they all end up bad in the later productions, and the company went out of business. I think it seems like Silicon Power is heading down the same path.

Even A-DATA doesn't do that.

I’ve had surprisingly good experiences with A-data in the past. Albeit again I don’t use their SSDs in anything important.

 

[dogememe]

Hmm, not entirely sure I'd agree that "2840 bed sectors" means the "disk is OK" but I think you get the idea. And here's how it looks trying to copy a file off it that's in an affected area.

But on the positive note, they finally responded through Facebook Messenger and are going to handle my RMA there. I'm not sure how I feel about that... but we shall see, we shall see. Haha.

 

[Pew]

I've never had a good experience with SP, last time I dealt with SP SSDs was a small client who had multiple SDs and Sandisk SSDs fail within a few years.

What SP is doing with the rma is the same thing all drive manufacturers are doing now. They'll let you return it and refund the price you paid but will not send you a new one; you will have to buy a new one at the inflated prices. According to reddit, WD just did this with an enterprise customer who had two Gold drives out of a batch of 100 new fail in a couple months.