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Comment by fweimer | Hacker News Reader

Surely the WD SN850x isn't high end? It doesn't even have power-loss protection as far as I can see. SSDs with protection are much more expensive.

(Not sure if Apple SSDs have power-loss protection. Not using sockets probably eliminates one source of accidental power loss.)

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When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD. Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).

I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5.

Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.

The SN850x is high-end for client/consumer SSDs. The ones you're referring to that have full power loss protection are enterprise SSDs, which is an entirely different market segment with different performance targets, different endurance rating methodology, and different expected feature set. Enterprise SSDs are not the right thing to compare Mac storage against.

Still, it's confusing to use WD as an example of high end. They have dramless which is like the winmodem of SSDs, and even in this case no encryption. Clearly they are a budget manufacturer that happened to have something that worked out for some people.

Samsung is a much better example of a manufacturer that Apple would be emulating, investing in their own controllers, etc, and certainly not leaving out security features with no plan.

You're completely wrong. Both Samsung and WD have a full lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, retail and OEM, including low-end DRAMless budget drives and high-end drives, with vertical integration of the NAND manufacturing, controller silicon, and bringing the complete drive to retail. Writing off WD as a budget manufacturer in favor of Samsung is stupid brand loyalty ungrounded in reality. Dismissing a high-end product because the same company also sells different low-end products under a different sub-brand is also ridiculous.

So I'm wrong that Samsung is a possible example of what Apple could be that doesn't make WD a realistic example. Apple would have no more experience designing and selling trash than a UNIX vendor would have had with IDE and that makes it harder to sell top end that uses cheap performance hacks some of the time.

I'm having difficulty parsing your comment and I'm not at all sure you're not just trolling, but I'll try to be simple and clear: WD as a brand is on par with Samsung. WD's high-end consumer SSDs are comparable in quality, performance, etc. to Samsung's high-end consumer SSDs. Using a WD high-end consumer SSD to compare against Apple's storage options is every bit as valid as using a Samsung high-end consumer SSD to compare against Apple's storage options. Implying that WD drives are all (or almost all) trash is wrong. Implying that Samsung drives are all (or almost all) trash is wrong. Asserting that Apple's Mac storage is substantially superior to high-end consumer SSDs in performance or reliability is wrong. Believing that any of these companies are above "cheap performance hacks" is wrong.

In the long term, Apple was on a cycle of market failure and then rejuvenation attempt because they either can't make high volumes of questionable components or they ruin their whole brand selling them. They have no dumping capability like a PC brand, I.e. I didn't even know what compromise Samsung's non-Pro models made vs EVO and they are obfuscated in searches by the PRO models. Great for dumping garbage for scale and testing out cost cutting tricks..

Intel leaving the SSD market probably has more relation to Apple than WD or Samsung.

I'm not asserting that Apple succeeds in making high quality, I'm saying their hardware trust makes them uncompetitive with the entire PC market where some brands will deliver high enough quality and all brands have access to low quality dumping to reach scale, etc.

Yes, they do. The base models. They gimp those in stupid ways ALL the time to use up questionable old components. Just look at how silly the iPad lineup got with regards to how they interface with the Pencil. Low end models use old lightning Pencils that require plugging in and an adapter from lightning to USB C. Then you got models with way too little storage and cut back storage so it's smaller and considerably slower than what's advertised, etc.

> They have no dumping capability like a PC brand, I.e. I didn't even know what compromise Samsung's non-Pro models made vs EVO and they are obfuscated in searches by the PRO models.

Ok, I think your first mistake here is assuming that retail SSDs are a priority for Samsung. What they actually care about are the SSDs they sell to PC OEMs, and the enterprise SSDs. They don't really need the retail product line to serve as some kind of experimental dumping grounds. The low-end models that make it to the retail product line exist because they already have similar models in mass production for PC OEMs, and they can make a retail version by changing from green solder mask to black solder mask and printing a new sticker. (The high-end retail models exist for much the same reason, but sometimes have more meaningful hardware differences because PC OEMs aren't so obsessive about maximizing scores on bad benchmarks.)

You've just explained to me how Samsung can maintain a good reputation in a way that Apple cannot using what I referred to as dumping..

I don't really understand how everyone on this thread can explain the nuances that should be what is interesting while claiming everything is the same.

Either technology/politics has changed and organizational structures we claimed in the 1980s to be both unethical and inefficient are now only unethical, or they have not changed and we are in the same cycle with these organizations as before but somehow elongated..

But no, what is interesting to HN is that there's a lot of fine detail in the physical market, but somehow when searching for any interpretation, a widget is a widget and Apple is WD and nothing interesting will ever happen again.

There are different ways to implement power-loss protection. There was a Twitter thread where a guy tested actual power-loss protection but it doesn't load anymore, too bad he didn't blog about it...

But at least the tech press wrote a bit about it, for example here[1], including a link on how Samsung implements it using journaling on consumer SSDs. I would expect WD to do something similar given that multiple WD drives passed the test.

[1]: https://hothardware.com/news/heads-up-nvme-ssds-lose-data-po...

There are also a lot cheaper ssds (nv2 or p3 are under 100 eur for 2tb often)

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