Buying a quality brake pad is just like buying medicine. When you are buying a legal drug, you are not paying the cost to manufacture, package or market the pill. The bulk of what you are paying for is research and development. The same is true for brake pads.
Aftermarket brake pads require a great deal of testing and engineering because they are made for a specific vehicle. A quality brake pad manufacturer will spend a lot of time and money developing a brake pad application for your vehicle. This includes simulated and on-the-vehicle testing. These types of testing are time and equipment intensive.
As a technician, it can be difficult to judge a brake pad before you put it on the vehicle. But, doing your homework and looking for certain visual cues can help you make the right choice.
CERAMIC
Ceramic material’s structural properties are very stable under high temperatures, much like Corning cookware. But this is where the comparison ends. Ceramic materials that go into a brake pad are very small strands that are engineered to be a certain length and width.
There are three advantages of ceramic pads in certain applications. First, since the ceramic materials offer stable performance under a wide range of temperatures, they can offer quiet performance. Second, ceramic brake pads manage heat in the caliper better on some vehicles than some non-ceramic applications. Third, ceramic brake dust does not show up on or stick to wheels like some other brake pad formulations. This could be an important factor if you have an expensive set of custom wheels.
NAO
Non-asbestos organic (NAO) friction materials typically wear more than harder semi-metallic compounds. It’s hard to generalize about the wear characteristics of NAO and ceramic-based compounds because there are so many. Wear varies depending on the formula the friction supplier chooses for a particular application. Different vehicles require different coefficients of friction, so formulas are often “application engineered” to deliver the best combination of stopping power, wear resistance, pedal feel and noise control. Most premium-quality NAO and ceramic-based linings will provide long life and wear less than an equivalent set of NAO pads on the same application.
For the full list of types of brake pads and its ‘pro’s and cons’ read the full article at Brake and Front End