Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Short version: Between WD "tech support" and the controller setup, these drives are designed to fail *MUCH* sooner than their paper specs would lead you to believe. This is an intentional decision that WD doesn't want to rectify. Long version: Unlike hard drives, SSD's have limited endurance and are affected by what's known as "write amplification". Basically, a write to NAND can only be done in units called "pages". Writing less than a page leaves part of the page empty. The controller can eventually stitch these smaller writes together, but it hurts performance, and more importantly, means that, in order to fill a page, the SSD has to write many pages. (Comparatively, if the OS knows the page size, it can issue writes in whole pages.) This "write amplification" can cause a major discrepancy in how much data the OS writes to the drive and how much is actually written to the NAND (which is what wears out). As a result, the drive can stop working as much as 10x sooner than expected. Now, a *reputable* manufacturer would advertise the page size, not only in the product documentation, but in a way that the OS can recognize. WD does neither; the only meaningful metric reported by the drive is a 512-byte "sector size". An OS that isn't actively on guard against such maliciousness is at risk of creating a huge write amplification factor (I've seen reports as high as 20x) and wearing out the SSD much, *much* sooner than would occur with proper use. So what is the *actual* page size? According to WD: "the information that you are looking for is a proprietary information and it is not available for the customers." (Note that there is widespread agreement that modern SSD's have a page size of *at least* 4KiB.)