Puget: Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2021

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Apr 24, 2016
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Introduction

Here at Puget Systems, we believe that computers should be a pleasure to purchase and own. They should get your job done, and not be a hindrance. That means it is important for the hardware we include in our workstations to both perform well (hence the testing we do in our Labs department) and also be as reliable as possible. Our product qualification process is the first step in building a reliable product line, but we also maintain records of hardware failures - both those we come across during the assembly process, as well as those reported to us by customers in the field - so that we can analyze failure rates over time. That information, in turn, can help guide our selection of products to qualify in the future.

While this is normally an internal process, sometimes we like to give our customers and readers a peek into aspects of our company that aren't usually in the public spotlight. In this article, we will look at both shop (caught in our production process) and field (after the system has shipped to the customer) failure rates of various hardware brands and models over the last three years. At the end, we will crown the most reliable component used in our workstations.
Conclusion

There are other types of hardware we use in our workstations - network interface cards, video capture devices, RAID controllers, and more - but the categories above are the main components and thus the ones for which we have the most data on failure rates. And after looking at all of that, which is the most reliable? Samsung solid-state drives, once again!

For those who have read our past articles in this series, this will likely come as no surprise. Solid-state drives have been extremely reliable since their introduction to workstation PCs over a decade ago, and Samsung in particular has done a stellar job of minimizing failure rates with the models we have carried. In fact, looking back over the entire history of Samsung SSDs in our records, we have sold over 35,000 drives and had less than 100 of those fail - very impressive!
 

plat

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The Samsung 980 Pro may be a "reliable" SSD but it needed four firmware revisions since it first came out a couple years ago and still has cache write issues, resulting in absolutely abysmal 4K writes. I will not buy it again (unless it's the 1 Terabyte model) but would instead get the 980 (non Pro). Cheaper, OK, and fewer read/write but the performance stays constant. I should know, I already have one but it's too small for my needs (250 GB only)
 

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