I did. In all my years of cycling, somehow I avoiding buying one of these until May 16th of this year. I bought this for daily use on my gravel bike.

After just over two months of use, I noticed that shifts into the 42t were a little slow and yesterday, I had the chain actually skip between pickup ramps before it engaged. This is after 610 miles, mostly gravel:

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Anyway, while looking for a replacement, I came across the Shimano Deore CS-M5100 cassette. I did not now this existed. Pictured below:

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This cassette has identical gearing to the XT and SLX versions, but the 42t cog is steel instead of aluminum. Yea, it is heavier.... weight weenies need not apply. But I seriously doubt that I will be replacing it in 2.5 months. SO... If you are shredding 42t aluminum cogs, give this a go. Bonus: It costs less.

I too am thinking of this or the slx/xt. Slx is like $7 more but less durable rei I believe. Where dis you buy your deore?

Btw what rear rd and crank you have?

 

Where dis you buy your deore?

Btw what rear rd and crank you have?

The Pro's Closet. $54.... but I had a free shipping coupon.

I'm using XT Di2 front and rear derailleurs with GRX Di2 Shifters. Crank is GRX 2x with Specialites TA 44/28 chainrings.

 

My wife’s bike has 11 speed slx. Great performance but wore out pretty quick.

 

I use a small chainring, 26t or 28t. The 42t cog is my bailout gear gets very little use. Depending on the type of terrain you ride I doubt if you spend any time using your 11t cassette cog especially with a 30t or bigger chainring.

 

Fast wearing alu sprockets are my experience with Sram 12 speed cassettes and I've been pointing that out lately, especially with 55 mm chainlines. Rendering $400 cassettes with long wear steel sprockets pointless if one is using the alu sprocket a lot. I get a lot of opposition for that by Sram riders who don't seem to, and some even proof that they don't, use the alu sprocket. Either because they aren't really climbing on their rides or because because they size their chain ring such that they are rarely on the alu sprocket. Which is what I do now, too. But of course, this also renders a 12 speed cassette pointless if you effectively riding 11 speed plus carrying a superfluous 12th sprocket. It's just an unnecessarily heavy 11 speed cassette.

Some Sram riders take any negative word about Sram extremely personally. You're lucky that you're complaining about Shimano ;-)

Alu sprockets, regardless of the brand, are fast wearing. If one doesn't want them to wear fast, there's only one solution: Don't use them.

It's a little bit disappointing to me that Sram and Shimano don't make the alu sprockets replaceable and that we have to throw away the complete cassette if the alu sprocket is done. No even Garbaruk seem to be offering their bolted on alu sprocket as a spare part. Makes no sense, other than being a business model, I guess. Too many consumers in the market who have no problem spending $400 on a cassette and for whom $300 is a "steal". So this is what we all get.

 

Fast wearing alu sprockets are my experience with Sram 12 speed cassettes and I've been pointing that out lately, especially with 55 mm chainlines. Rendering $400 cassettes with long wear steel sprockets pointless if one is using the alu sprocket a lot. I get a lot of opposition for that by Sram riders who don't seem to, and some even proof that they don't, use the alu sprocket. Either because they aren't really climbing on their rides or because because they size their chain ring such that they are rarely on the alu sprocket. Which is what I do now, too. But of course, this also renders a 12 speed cassette pointless if you effectively riding 11 speed plus carrying a superfluous 12th sprocket. It's just an unnecessarily heavy 11 speed cassette.

Some Sram riders take any negative word about Sram extremely personally. You're lucky that you're complaining about Shimano ;-)

Alu sprockets, regardless of the brand, are fast wearing. If one doesn't want them to wear fast, there's only one solution: Don't use them.

Amazing that you came into a thread about an issue with a Shimano product and turned it into a SRAM product/user issue. At least admit you simply hate the brand and cannot be objective.

Most impressively here, since the product in question is Shimano, you used this opportunity to bash SRAM users, since there was little opportunity to attack the product.

 

No wonder REI had discounted the XT 10-51t 12sp cassettes and I got maybe too many lol

 

SRAM makes a gx level 11 speed cassette with a steel granny for the xD driver and of course the NX is all steel and goes on a HG. There’s a Sunrace 11-46 too and lots of other less common brands

SRAM group set levels on bikes don’t map directly to retail replacements because they play some cheesy games with OEM builds.

 

Not XT, but Microshift alloy 42 on Advent 9 became useless far too soon. In front, it looks like the wide aluminum teeth on narrow wide allow a tiny chainring to last a while.

I thought SRAM x-sync dealt with the wear trouble in back.

 

Stay out of your granny gear and you’ll never wear out the 42t cog…

 

Are you sure the cassette is done... and the issue is not related to chain, chainline, der etc?

FWIW I'm 200lbs, fair amount of power, 35lb bike, and live in the land of winch/plummet where much of my time is spent climbing tapped out of gear while perched on the nose... I'll get up to 500k out of an M8000 cassette before I preemptively swap the whole drivetrain out. I'm probably close to 3M ft elev with the same identical setup.

 

Are you sure the cassette is done... and the issue is not related to chain, chainline, der etc?

I have about 5 different cassettes I run on this bike and have thousands of miles on it. One of them is the M8000 11-46. I rarely use it, but it too shows quite a bit of wear on the aluminum cog. None of the steel cassettes are worn like this, so I don't think it's a chainline or drivetrain issue.

I do think I know what is causing it now, though. We rode last night and it had rained most of the day. We have a lot of sandy gravel here that when it gets wet becomes a nasty, gritty paste that sticks to everything. I spent two hours last night cleaning bikes and re-waxing chains. This morning I was putting my wife's chain back on and noticed that all the teeth on her front chainrings were packed with highly polished sand on the bearing surfaces between the teeth. I had to wrap a wet microfiber towel around a toothbrush handle to get it out. Toothbrush bristles would not remove it.

We did a 55 mile gravel race here a month ago and I used the 11-42 pictured above. It had rained the night before and the first 10 miles of the race was damp, sandy gravel like I described above. I was 1 mile into the first climb and the 42t started making really nasty creaking sounds. I carry a small bottle of Squirt with me for these sort of occasions and it stopped making noise. But I bet I did the lion's share of damage in that race alone. 4500 feet of climbing, shifting back and forth between the 37t and the 42t mostly.

At the end of the day, my environment and setup are causing premature wear on the aluminum cogs. The simple solution for me is to use an all steel cassette.

 

Wish I’d read this thread before I bought the XT cassette from REI… I think they had the deore too but I didn’t want to ‘downgrade’ from the SLX that came on my bike and figured XT was better and I have an XT derailleur but d’oh! Life was simpler in the 90s lol.

 

Dude, same here

 

Unless you have a darn good reason otherwise, steel is the way. The only potential downside while riding is that if you are hauling butt and stop pedaling quickly, the cassette can 'overrun' for a just a moment (keep rotating and slacken your chain until the RD can pick up the slack) due to the extra rotating weight. Generally causes no issues though. Just don't ask about it here if it happens though, some weirdo that doesn't understand physics will insist your hub is working incorrectly and will tell you you're wrong when you say it is working fine.

Go for it!

 

Interesting my bike came with an SLX cassette and I didn’t really think about it. But after looking at it the 51t does show more ware than the rest of the cassette. I guess when it’s time I will replace it with an all steel one. Anyone know what the Deore 10-51 weighs compared to the SLX? Also it looks like SunRace has a microspline cassette that’s all steel but I would have to order from Europe. The cassette looks like it’s 675g.