Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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...
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.
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.
However, every SSD out there has unallocated space. This is for trim and drive write purposes.
At the mfg level, if you needed to get more space, you can. This will affect the drive rates per day (DWPD) rating of the drive.
In the server world, you can get “high endurance” drives that are 90% just under-provisioned for storage space.
It's a bit more complicated than that. None of the quantities precisely correspond to the definitions of 1TB = 1000^4 or 1TiB = 1024^4 bytes. A "1TB" drive will have a host-accessible capacity of 1,024,209,543,168 bytes.
The NAND chips on a consumer 1TB drive will collectively have a nominal capacity of 1TiB (1,099,511,627,776), but that's more of a lower bound; the actual capacities those chips add up to will be higher. If we assume defect-free flash and count the bits used for ECC in order to get an idea of how many memory cells are physically present, then we get numbers as high as 1,335,416,061,952 bytes for our 1TB drive. If we don't count the space reserved for ECC, then we're down to about 1,182,592,401,408 bytes on defect-free flash, and 1,172,551,237,632 after initial defects (taken from a random consumer TLC drive in my collection).
So that means the SSD is starting out with about 14.48% more capacity to work with than it provides to the host system—considerably more than the 9.95% discrepancy between the official definitions of 1TB and 1TiB. Of course, that 14.48% will be reduced as the drive wears out, and the low-grade flash used in thumb drives and bargain barrel SSDs from non-reputable brands will tend to have more initial defects.
This is yugely better than what some other SSD makers have done. ADATA for example has massively downgraded some drives, trying to sell those under the same name and part numbers as a popular good-selling drive, and done so completely silently. ADATA isn't the only one. The screaming about this situation is endless on several pc part enthusiast subreddits.
But no they want to benefit from the good name and customer perception of the "970 Evo Plus SSD" while selling a substantially different product under that name. That is fraudulent behavior!
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.
In America, they have TVs, and cell phones. I find it very hard to believe SSDs are their pride and butter
I have a Samsung TV which has great picture quality, decent design and plenty of useful options for a very reasonable price.
From my unscientific sample, yes.
The Sony Master series of OLED TV's (e.g. A9) are IMHO, most likely the best TV you can buy at the moment.
I've seen them side-by-side next to high-end Panasonic kit, and whilst the Panasonics put on a good show compared to your average TV, the high-end Sony's are noticeably better.
The Sony firmware also seems to behave more consistently with HDMI auto-switching than the Panasonics. Sometimes you ended up having to switch manually on the Panasonic because whatever automagic was meant to happen didn't happen.
Then you have to use a raspberry PI or some other mini computer to get the same use out of it. And then why use a "smart" TV in the first place?
I am not happy my TV does an HDCP handshake. My device should not enforce someone else's rules.
However, ignoring data loss there are many ways to have a less performant drive that still doesn't lose data. Tons of people buy those.
Are all the complainers in HN really letting their TV connect to Internet (inspire of knowing all the crap TV manufacturers have been pulling all these years?!)
That reaffirmed my stance on Smart TVs remaining dumb in my house. Netflix through the Xbox only!
Whether it's a good idea or not is a different matter entirely, but the notion that you "have no choice" is just silly. Is someone forcing you to watch YouTube through your TV?
Why are people complaining about Smart TVs in a thread about SSD?
I don't complain, though. Its smart capabilities are absolutely sufficient to me.
However, nothing is as durable as SanDisk and Sony high end (Extreme Pro in SanDisk terminology) cards. My old CF is still kicking and a pair of 64GB cards in my mirrorless doesn't care what I pump into them (all of them are SanDisk).
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 [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-xpg-sx8200-pro-contr...
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.
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.oempc...
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
Not everyone is a creator editing/rendering 4k videos. For the typical surfer/office worker/gamer QLC drives are fine because they rarely need to dump 50+GB of writes at a time. What you're suggesting is basically "ban all atom processors because they're criminally slow!"
So consumer SSDs now depend on a limited dynamic part of flash being used as SLC to cache writes. Just that this dynamic part mostly gets smaller the fuller the device is.
And as soon as you do anything with large writes you will hit a brick wall of slowness, on full devices sooner then on empty ones.
And I bet the vast majority of people basically never do >10GB writes at >200MB/s.
But the information about the limited write cache never gets mentioned by the manufacturers. So people that actually need to write large amounts of data from time to time, fall into a performance trap.
Only device managed SMR is terrible. Host managed SMR is fine for data-hording if the savings in size/price are forwarded.
Exactly. When you architect your tiered data storage solution to take advantage of technologies such as SMR/QLC it works great. This is absolutely not the case in consumer applications. Consumers will use QLC for their boot drives and fill their NAS boxes with SMR drives and have a horrible experience.
I'll believe it when I see it, though.
Unless you're trying to cram more data into a 2.5 inch drive, there seems to be zero upside to getting an SMR drive. They're priced about the same per byte despite "25% density improvements", and the high capacity 3.5 inch models on the market don't use it.
Sure they do. WD sold device managed SMR 3.5 disks without telling anyone. And then people noticed because of absolutely terrible raid re-silvering performance.
The consumer market is absolute trash for SMR devices, all the disadvantages with no benefit. But you can be sure that the enterprise sector gets host managed SMR drives at a better size/price ratio.
The biggest SMR drives I can buy are 6TB or 8TB.
The biggest non-SMR drive I can buy is 18TB.
https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
And yeah that's why I said on the market rather than 'in existence'.
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.
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.
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/ssd/client-ssd/MZVLB1T...
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".
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...
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.
I know Ars knows this because they allude to in bottom of article. Click-baity.
I'm really surprised this hasn't bubbled-up to normies yet. I suspect this Christmas is going to be a shocker.
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.
> 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-we...
vs
Let's change the controller and hope nobody notices.
That second part is what's important. Downgrading the feature without notifying the customer and arranging to correct the shortfall later is pretty terrible.
I have 2tb version bought last year, works great - but will opt for 980 Pro instead should I need more now.
(Have a 1tb version of that too, when it first came out. Works well but honestly there's no difference between the two even with pcie4).