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Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs
- jrockway 5y agoThat's one way to deal with the counterfeiting problem -- just counterfeit your own devices! It's what the "sort by lowest price first" market demands, I guess.
- est31 5y agoIs Samsung the lowest price manufacturer? I've thought those are other manufacturers, and Samsung distinguishes itself through quality instead.
- simonh 5y agoThey do have good R&D and some pretty nice technology, that side of the business is solid, but their product divisions will frequently cut some pretty severe corners to get stuff out on time regardless of whether it's ready or not.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 5y agoYeah, I think Samsung's consumer SSDs are up there. I have two and they're great. But, there is no "sort by highest quality first" option on Newegg or Amazon, and their happy customers are already happy with their SSDs. (This is going to digress into reviews being the "sort by quality", but I think we know that reviews aren't very good. The fundamental problem is that most throwaway reviewers don't know how to review something as complex as an SSD. So unless the option on the ecommerce site is "sort by what Anandtech thinks about this", you are probably just sorting by a random and easily-manipulated number.)
- smhost 5y agoEven if the reviews were good, it still wouldn't be "sort by quality". It would just be how much they liked the thing for the price they paid.
- maccard 5y agoEven if they did review them well, most reviews are samples provided by manufacturer, and are performed on a single unit typically. If a manufacturer is willing to swap components in batches of products, they're willing to try to cheat reviewers too.
- ziml77 5y agoIt's important for reviewers to keep their eye on what people are saying about a product. I after they review something, user reviews don't line up, they should purchase a unit themselves and redo their testing. If the testing shows a change, then they should both shame the company and stop accepting review units from that division of the company so they can be sure they're not getting hand-picked samples.
- maccard 5y agoIn an ideal world yes but I don't think I've ever experienced reviews being done like this. Rtings purchase their own units but still would run afoul of swapping xomponents in lines. Reviews of live service video games are rarely updated unless something drastic changes (see the Destiny 2 issues where they pulled old content from the game...)
- scns 5y agoIt the last years Samsung where the ones to beat in the SSD space. Higher price and higher perfomance, which can be measured but seldom felt in day to day operations, so i opted to save some bucks and bought Crucial SSDs.
- _red 5y agoHey Ars, there is a global chip shortage right now. I doubt Samsung is doing this to screw over their customers, rather its either this or nothing. I know Ars knows this because they allude to in bottom of article. Click-baity.
- jmartinpetersen 5y agoNo, that's a false dichotomy. They could've just made up a new name for it.
- _red 5y agoI work in hardware design. Almost all ICs are very very limited supply. In our own case we had to move from 512K MCU to 256K simply because lead times are now until Dec 2022 on the 512K version. I'm really surprised this hasn't bubbled-up to normies yet. I suspect this Christmas is going to be a shocker.
- tux3 5y agoThat is both unnecessarily rude, and missing the point the parent post is making. Companies want to use whatever they can get that's vaguely compatible with the current design. Because it's that or selling nothing for 12 more months. Sure. But that is not an excuse for misleading the customer. Couldn't find any components wich perform equally well? Then it's a different SKU. Slap a suffix on the name, adjust the price as needed, and don't mix inventory.
- vosper 5y agoWith is what WD are doing, having just been caught changing parts in a way that impacts performance > A Western Digital spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the company had replaced the NAND flash and updated the firmware in the WD Blue SN550 beginning in June 2021 and updated the drive's data sheet to reflect the changes. "For greater transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/silent-changes-to-western-digitals-budget-ssd-may-lower-speeds-by-up-to-50/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/silent-changes-to-we...
- dkbrk 5y agoDoes anyone have a list of SSD manufacturers that don't do this? Are SK Hynix and Intel still reliable?
- londons_explore 5y agoAll manufacturers multi-source parts. That will always have some very minor impact on power/reliability at least. The difference here is it makes a major difference. See also:. Apple sourcing 4g modems from both intel and Qualcomm, and the performance being quite different so they disabled features of qualcomms chip to make them similar.
- wmf 5y agoAll manufacturers multi-source parts. No, not really. The whole point of buying Samsung SSDs is that they're guaranteed to contain a Samsung controller and Samsung NAND. Likewise with Hynix or WD/SanDisk.
- londons_explore 5y agoAnd the resistors? Multi-sourced.
- upbeat_general 5y agoThe new controller is still a samsung controller. Just a newer one.
- proto-n 5y agoLinus and Luke (of ltt) had a brief discussion about this on yesterday's WAN show [1], might be somewhat relevant. They mention intel and sk hynix as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w3biMwl9m4&t=1584s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w3biMwl9m4&t=1584s
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amelius 5y agoDo we now have to place our SSDs in raid configuration to get reliability? The problem is that I don't have enough slots.
- wmf 5y agoThis story has nothing to do with reliability.
- PixelOfDeath 5y agoWith the introduction of QLC consumer SSDs, with worse write endurance and life time but the same price as TLC, I took a look at used enterprise SSDs and never looked back. The only issues is the connectors. You need 8x PCI-E lanes (4x might work) or a SAS connector that nearly no consumer board has.
- llampx 5y agoDo you have any recommendations? How does the price per TB compare?
- PixelOfDeath 5y agoI got myself a used pm1725b (PCI-E v3 8x) with 3.2TB for 400€. It hat ~350TB written, and according to Samsung is rated for 3 full device writes per day for 5 years = 17280 TB. So I have some wriggle room left. They use lots of capacitors to hold written data in a dram and flush it out to flash on sudden power down. So they can optimize write operations for speed and low flash wear. Write speed and endurance is the part where consumer SSDs suck more and more ass. Annoyingly many sellers do not put up the written amount of data. But I think that is more out of ignorance and less to try to dump worn down devices.
- fomine3 5y agoU.2 to PCIe mounter or U.2 to M.2 cable is fine.
- PixelOfDeath 5y agoI would not trust a cheap chinese PCI-E to U.2 connector. And used SAS cards become kind of hot and need active cooling. So why not just directly go for a PCI-E SSD?
- shadilay 5y agoQLC is complete trash and should never be used outside of a WORM architecture in a larger pool. That they are trying to force it on consumers is criminal. Same with SMR.
- jbverschoor 5y agoSo basically they're defrauding consumers..
- bserge 5y agoIn light of the chip shortages everyone is talking about, I've been scratching my head about all the laptops, desktops and AIOs on the market - there are millions of them, from dozens of manufacturers (or so it seems). All soldered down but using modern chips from Intel and nVidia, same chips everyone claims are in short supply. Who is buying these things? What happens to them when they're not sold? Where are all the old ones going? Is anyone even bothering to desolder older generation chips like Intel 9xxx CPUs and nVidia 10xx GPUs and even RAM? It has always seemed weird to me, but now that building a desktop has become more expensive than it should be it just seems insane.
- yellow_lead 5y agoOnes with good GPUs are being bought, chopped/stripped, and sold on eBay / Craigslist. My observation, anyways.
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoYes, why does the chip shortage only effect high end card/car chips. I would be pretty darn surprised if laptop/smartphones have less number of chips than cars, still the former industry doesn't seem to be affected by chip shortage even though they sell a lot more pieces for lot less price so the later industry would be willing to pay more per chip.
- maccard 5y agoI'm an uninformed consumer but if I had to guess chip binning plays a huge part in the availability of parts. If a production line can produce X chips per day with 20% highest quality, 30% "mid range" and 40% "low end" (with 10% waste) you'll have 2x as many low end chips available as high end ones.
- wmf 5y agoThe chip shortage doesn't mean no chips, just fewer. Vendors like Dell, HP, and Lenovo locked in long-term contracts with fixed pricing which enables them to still build PCs. Store shelves also show anti-survivorship bias where the stuff people want is sold out while the stuff no one wants is still on the shelves.
- bede 5y agoAs a legal layman, is this possible class action territory?
- stingraycharles 5y agoIANAL, but I believe that as long as they reach their advertised speeds, they’re fine. Alternatively, you would need to prove malicious intent to deceive the benchmarks; but I can see Samsung make the argument for “we had to change to different $supplier because of chip shortage, and we incremented the revision number accordingly, and still reach advertised speeds”.
- bbarnett 5y agoAccording to article, all performance tests, and claims, seem to come from one Chinese reviewer. One person. If so, this is highly irresponsible. The language (likely, seems to, may be) in the article only highlights this. There seems to be no attempt to contact Samsung either. Really?!? Edit: The cynic in me, wonders of this single review was paid for, to make WD look "less bad". A review / story with no proof, only one person reporting it, no attempt to contact samsung, and I see many here assume it is 100% verified as true. Sure takes the heat off of wd a bit...
- gkanai 5y agoSamsung has admitted the action and has committed to changing the product model number if this happens again.
- bbarnett 5y agoSource? All articles I can find, are just "seemingly" reporting, none confirmed, almost all identical, all based upon one user, like the article from this post.
- stevespang 5y agoDoes not preclude class action lawyers from stepping in and raking in millions from Samsung for DECEPTION.
- lvs 5y agoSomething doesn't line up here. The "old" model number in the ars piece is given as MZVLB1T0HBLR, which corresponds to a PM981a according to Samsung's website. Was that ever sold as a 970 Evo Plus? https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/ssd/client-ssd/MZVLB1T0HBLR-00$00-07/ https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/ssd/client-ssd/MZVLB1T...
- davb 5y agoIt would seem to be the case. lshw reports the controller on my 970 Evo Plus as "NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983"
- option_greek 5y agoI used to work in their SSD vertical on the software side. For what it's worth, SSD/memory business unit is their pride. They never used to cut corners and do rigorous testing to ensure their customers aren't screwed over. Even when a bad batch of SSDs were shipped by mistake, they would recall/refund all of them proactively. When ever a new model is released, they would first ship limited units to a set of SSD enthusiasts including gamers in Korea. One such time, there was a BSOD reported by a single tester in some edge case - > they sent a lot of team members in person to chase and fix that issue. So I really doubt they would do anything stupid to get some quick bucks at the cost of reputation. On the other hand, their smart tv division is absolute garbage and employees themselves wouldn't buy Samsung TVs.
- treyfitty 5y agoSamsung’s pride and butter is their SSD group? I find that hard to believe… they provide a range of products, including cars (they dominate the SKorean auto market), as well as financial services (in S Korea). In America, they have TVs, and cell phones. I find it very hard to believe SSDs are their pride and butter
- nitinreddy88 5y agoAmerica doesn’t represent world. In asian countries, Samsung and WD controls almost entire SSD market
- philliphaydon 5y agoI see like no advertising for Samsung or WD SSDs in Singapore and Taiwan. The last advert I saw was Silicon Power which I believe is Taiwanese?
- bluerival 5y agoWhat is pride and butter?
- gregd 5y ago
- 45ure 5y agoThe downgrades seem to be prevalent across the Evo (Plus) range, for a while now. I got burnt twice, on two different microSD cards -- one was for a Raspberry Pi (64GB) in Jan 2020, and another quite recently for my S20 (128GB). The 256GB version was not affected by the downgrade to a lower write speed. Initially, the changes in lower write speeds from 90MB/s to 60MB/s were not communicated, either through a press release, or via the specs on the Samsung site. However, it was eventually updated, i.e. the change of letters indicating different model numbers: MB-MCxxxGA vs MB-MCxxxHA, the latter suggesting a new '2020 model' with inferior write speeds. https://web.archive.org/web/20210521102732/https://www.oempcworld.com/important-change-to-samsung-flash-product-lineup/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210521102732/https://www.oempc...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KingOfCoders 5y agoNot sure why you would burn your top brand.
- kasabali 5y agoThey've been demoting their brands since 980 PRO (which should've been actually called 980 EVO by all means)
- h2odragon 5y agoThis story (different publisher) was linked here yesterday; they comments I saw were all "This must be bullshit, Samsung would only inline upgrades", etc.
- shadilay 5y agoImagine trying to ship a hardware product and then having these changes snuck in. Functionally it's no different than counterfeiting for companies with these SSD's in their BOM. Just plain fraudulent.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoMeh. Most consumers haven't done anything to need or deserve 1/100 of this performance
- scns 5y agoThe reporting is this case is a little dramatized IMHO. As you can read here [0] they actually use the controller from the 980 Pro and more dense NAND, Billy Tallis from Anandtech filled in some missing technical detail. You actually gain performance in the random 4K case, which is important in day to day operations but you loose sequential write speed if you exceed the SLC-Cache of 115GB. This differs quite significantly from WD silently changing the Blue drive from TLC (okay with Cache) to QLC which nets you write speeds lower than HDDs after the cache is full. Crucial did TLC->QLC on the P2 too, but you could get those drives for 30% less up until a week ago. (edit) forgot to mention ADATA who switched the controller of their SX8200 Pro [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28320640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28320640 [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-xpg-sx8200-pro-controller-change https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-xpg-sx8200-pro-contr...
- shanoaice 5y ago(OT) If my information is not wrong......the new WD SN550 drive still uses a TLC NAND (Kioxia BiCS5, which is the same NAND flash as the SN350 960GB version) but may have done some modification to the firmware/controller to lower the speed.
- M277 5y agoThis is actually better for most consumers. The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold and the controller is a superior one (it now uses the same one as the 980 PRO). TechPowerUp[0] has a much better post on this, and you can clearly see there that the new one is better in most cases than the old one. The only ones disadvantaged by this change are people who constantly write >42GB which I would think are video editors. (The old version would get a speed reduction to 1500MB/s after overflowing the SLC cache (42GB), the new one goes down to 800MB/s after overflowing (115GB)) P.S.: Not defending this, just clarifying because most posters here seem to believe it's a straight up downgrade. Should also be worth noting that Samsung changed the product box, product number, firmware version and the spec sheet for this change. So they're significantly better than the others who have done similar moves. That said, I still believe that they should have called this the 971 Evo+ or something, as it's genuinely different. [0]: https://www.techpowerup.com/286008/et-tu-samsung-samsung-too-changes-components-for-their-970-evo-plus-ssd https://www.techpowerup.com/286008/et-tu-samsung-samsung-too...
- belltaco 5y ago>The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold How can they do that without reducing the overall capacity? My understanding is that part of the MLC storage in SSDs is used as an SLC cache so that it's faster, but can store only half, one third or one fourth of the data it otherwise would.
- shanoaice 5y agoGenerally SLC cache has almost no connection to the overall size of the drive. After finishing writing a huge portion of data (for example), the controller will start to move the written data out of the SLC section and turn them into normal TLC mode, releasing the SLC space for next turn of writing. When the drive usage becomes higher, some drive (apparantly Samsung's drive does) have a dynamic SLC capacity policy that will reduce the avaliable SLC space, so the disk can have enough space to store normal TLC data.
- cwizou 5y agoIn general, there are two separate components to the SLC cache strategy (which as you said, is writing only one bit instead of 3 for TLC, because it's much faster to do so). First you have some overprovisionned NAND, the size of which depends with models. I believe it is 6 GB on this one. Then you have what they call "intelligent turbowrite", which is a dynamically allocated/reallocated SLC cache (about 108 GB). For both, the concept is broadly the same, your writes go into the overprovisionned "SLC cache" first, then into the dynamic one. When the drive is idle, it will consolidate the writes of both caches as 3 bit writes, freeing the NAND for "SLC cache" use again. This can take a few minutes of idle time. As you fill up your disk things get more complicated, you need to keep some free space to be able to consolidate your writes, the exact way this controller works in that case is not known to me, but this is an issue with every SSD that's not full SLC. Modern controllers usually are doing much better than the old ones.
- mjw1007 5y agoI wonder if there's scope for dealing with this sort of situation in trademark law. That is, maybe we could make the law say "if you want to be able to use the courts to limit the use of your brand name, you have to follow certain rules about when you can use the same model name for different products".
- cwizou 5y agoPreviously discussed here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329386 This is massively overblown, especially the comparison to what happened at other manufacturers. Samsung announced the change, changed the packaging, and updated the specs on their site. And they changed for a better controller (from the 980 Pro) with 4X more write queues and an improved dynamic SLC cache strategy. It is slower in one (minor) edge case but will be faster in every single other ones. If I had the choice I'd pick the new one, without question.