I want to buy reliable SSD's for internal work.
Obvious choice is Samsung 870 Evo - SATA. , other alternate is Crucial MX500.
Samsung has more TBW rating and is based on QLC flash , wherein crucial uses TLC .
However I am keen to know expert opinion and real world experience .

I have a mix of evo and MX500 here -I can't tell any difference in normal usage.

Not sure I'd use a commercial grade SSD for drive images (if that's what you're planning) depending on your through-put you may see considerably reduce drive life - that might not matter, all depends on what you're planning on doing with them.

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Thanks Lardman

Yes for normal usage difference may not be visible. But following information about endurance , type of nand and other technical factors provoked me for this query.
I will be using this ssd towards internal data storage ( crucial data for long time) , I want to buy drives of different sizes - 250 GB for live winpe USB boot.
larger drives for disk cloning etc. So I am looking for highly reliable , well built drive.
This is from Anandtech ---

The industry put a lot of effort into preparing for the arrival of QLC NAND: beefing up error correction to
compensate for lower write endurance, and tuning cache algorithms on consumer drives to forestall dealing
with lower performance after SLC caches run out. But in spite of all the work it took to make QLC SSDs
viable, they haven't made much of a splash and definitely aren't displacing TLC from the market yet.
The 870 QVO does bring a controller update, replacing the MJX with the MKX in
Samsung's long line of SATA SSD controllers. Samsung hasn't disclosed any particular enhancements to
their controller or firmware architecture, and we suspect this iteration is a more minor update than the last
one.

almost any drive can saturate the 6Gbps interface under ideal conditions, with random or sequential reads
or writes at a high enough queue depth. Samsung goes the extra mile to provide specs for performance at
queue depth 1, and performance after the SLC cache runs out. Some of those numbers look pretty brutal:
sequential write speeds dropping to a mere 80MB/s for the 1TB model, and even random reads are
considerably slower when accessing QLC data rather than the SLC cache. But overall, these specs are very
similar to the 860 QVO. Random write performance at QD1 appears to have taken a bit of a hit, but
everywhere else performance for the 870 QVO is rated to be equal or slightly better than its predecessor.

In a way, that's good for this review, because the 870 QVO doesn't have much direct competition in the form
of other large QLC SATA drives. Most of the SSDs that are considerably cheaper than the 860/870 QVOs
are DRAMless SSDs, usually TLC but occasionally QLC. The cheapest entry-level NVMe SSDs are all either
DRAMless with TLC, or use QLC with a more mainstream controller.

Winpe will be fine on anything, I personally wouldn't look at retail SSD for your other uses, the QVO drives only have 3 years warranty or the endurance of 1 years daily rewrites. I'd be looking at the EVOs instead, twice the price but slightly better. You could look at enterprise SSDs to improve endurance I think level 1 tech have a series of reviews or it might have been forum posts - It's all a matter of costs, I certainly don't have a LTT size budget .

Here bulk storage is on raided spinning rust using cheap mid capacity drives, in house data and client data are kept on separate systems. I only moved the drive images to raid to squeeze a bit more speed when doing raw scans/multiple operations, otherwise it's just not needed. All IMHO as I'm sure we all design our internal stuff differently.

_________________
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https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Thanks Lardman
Yes for winpe I will be using evo /crucial MX500 , but for important backup I will prefer samsung 870 Evo only.
It is using MLC flash and is having higher workload limits and warranty as well (5 years )
samsung is one of the manufacturer who use SLC cache.
My usage will be very basic I want to backup office data which is very small in size. I am looking for highly reliable cosumer ssd as enterprise ssd's are too costly.

Samsung 870 EVO is build using MLC flash which is having high endurance,
While samsung 870 QVO is uses inferior QLC nand.
Crucial MX500 series is having TLC nand which is again lower quality .

EVO is always TLC. If you want MLC go for Samsung PRO. It has higher endurance over the EVO. There is one exception: newest Samsung 980 PRO (nVme) is using TLC NAND.

I am looking for SSD for backing up data /imaging etc.
Which will be best option -

1) 2.5" SATA SSD + USB casing
2) M.2 NvMe SSD+ USB casing -- USB 3.2 Type C -- USB interface

Considering NVME SSD's become very hot what is best suited in terms of reliability and endurance.

You might want to consider something with built-in USB like Samsung T7 Touch or SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable.

If you have a Crucial MX500, you might want to check its write amplification. You may get a shock.

Crucial MX500 500GB SATA SSD Remaining Life decreasing fast despite few bytes being written:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/crucial-mx500-500gb-sata-ssd-remaining-life-decreasing-fast-despite-few-bytes-being-written.3571220/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Wo great Information.
fzabkar Thanks a lot , I was not even aware of write amplification.
You always go to root of the problem with most comprehensive information. Appreciate all the efforts.
In conclusion -- Any cheaper SSD including popular brands like crucial /micron are highly unreliable. Trustworthy among the present breed of consumer SSD's is undoubtltfully samsung. It is one of the only SSD having Dram cache. Samsung specifies clearly all parameters of the SSD.