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Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

arstechnica.com

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Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#11

Post by mirker »

userbinator wrote: post #3

Products that don't behave the same should really have different part numbers. In this example, perhaps they could call them SN550 and SN550A (B, C, etc.) or even SN551, SN552, ... if the majority of the design hasn't changed.

Yes, a great current example is consumer motherboards with Intel’s I225V network controller. The controller is unable to run at 2.5Gbps without a fix. The controller was fixed in revision 3, but a huge number of boards are shipping with revision 2. This is two years after the issue was identified, and there is no way to see which one you will get. Even boards manufactured this year have the old NIC, so I assume vendors are being shady to liquidate old NIC stock.

So you get sold a motherboard with a 2.5X NIC slowdown compared to advertised (it gets downgraded to 1Gbps). Update the figure on the box if you’re going to do that!

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#12

Post by leetcrew »

MR4D wrote: post #6

Why is this not fraud? If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to defraud. If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds to do the same thing, you’d have a pretty good argument - especially if everyone else experienced your same situation. I’d be…

I don't think there's any requirement that manufacturers guarantee results of third-party reviews for the entire run of a product. it probably just has to meet the specs published by the manufacturer. as long as you still hit that burst read number with some insane queue depth, everything's cool.

the corvette example doesn't really make sense because the manufacturer provides their own 0-60 number. if no one can hit the manufacturer's number in ideal conditions, that's a problem. now if the manufacturer updates their official specs to 0-60 in 10 seconds, that would be pretty weird, but not illegal.

I remember a similar situation with RAM a few years ago. there was some highly sought-after die that could be overclocked way outside the official specs. you could buy a couple different examples of the same SKU and they would have wildly different overclocking limits based on the underlying die. eventually that die wasn't produced anymore, so no one got the insane overclocks. people were really unhappy about that, but at the end of the day, they were relying on behavior that was outside the promised specification.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#13

Post by LeifCarrotson »

MR4D wrote: post #6

Why is this not fraud? If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to defraud. If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds to do the same thing, you’d have a pretty good argument - especially if everyone else experienced your same situation. I’d be…

I think it's at least in part because everyone understands (or thinks they understand) 0-60 times for cars.

But when you start talking about multi-level caches single-level cell memory and the shingled magnetic recording debacle and get down to 02031 1T00 SanDisk Flash vs 60523 1T00 SanDisk Flash chips and continuous writing performance of more than 12 GB, eyes begin to glaze over. For most consumers, it's a black box, the implementation details are unknowable and irrelevant.

People would be ticked off if the Corvette had an undersized radiator that caused it to go into limp-home mode any time you took it to the track, we're starting into slightly esoteric "car guy" details. But enough people know what a radiator is and care about cooling system performance that car manufacturers listen. Very few consumers understand the workings of an SSD; manufacturers are under a lot less pressure as a result.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#14

Post by justinclift »

Const-me wrote: post #2

We only have 4 manufacturers of SSD drives who also making their own chips: Intel, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Here’s the table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solid-state_drive_manu... I tend to buy Samsung and Intel, both working well in my devices.

> I tend to buy Samsung and Intel, both working well in my devices.

It's a generalisation, but be careful of using new Samsung consumer SATA drives (860, 870) if you're using Linux.

The Linux kernel has workarounds in place for the older ones (840, 850 series). But the workarounds for the newer models are only starting to be looked at this week:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203475

Without those workarounds (eg disabling NCQ trim), there are data loss problems.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#15

Post by theli0nheart »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #13
MR4D wrote: post #6

Why is this not fraud? If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to defraud. If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds to do the same thing, you’d have a pretty good argument - especially if everyone else experienced your same situation. I’d be…

I think it's at least in part because everyone understands (or thinks they understand) 0-60 times for cars. But when you start talking about multi-level caches single-level cell memory and the shingled magnetic recording debacle and get down to 02031 1T00 SanDisk Flash vs 60523 1T00 SanDisk Flash chips and continuous writing performance of more than 12 GB, eyes begin to glaze over. For most consumers, it's a black bo…

You don’t need to understand the workings of a car to get that 0-60 in 10s is worse than 0-60 in 5s.

Likewise, you don’t need to understand the workings of an SSD to get that 10s to copy 1GB of data is worse than 5s to copy 1GB of data.

Implementation details are irrelevant here.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#16

Post by antasvara »

MR4D wrote: post #6

Why is this not fraud? If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to defraud. If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds to do the same thing, you’d have a pretty good argument - especially if everyone else experienced your same situation. I’d be…

The real question is what Western Digital says the speed for the drive is. I would guess that the changes don't touch the stated top speed, as the article seems to indicate that this only slows down write speeds after the cache is filled.

If Western Digital specified an average write speed, this might be affected. However, that average could technically not have changed depending on how they determined this average speed (for example, they could have determined this average by downloading and uploading smaller files).

I'd say that Western Digital isn't affecting the 0-60 time in ideal conditions, just decreasing the ability of the drive to attain that 0-60 time in less than ideal conditions.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#17

Post by bachmeier »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #13
MR4D wrote: post #6

Why is this not fraud? If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to defraud. If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds to do the same thing, you’d have a pretty good argument - especially if everyone else experienced your same situation. I’d be…

I think it's at least in part because everyone understands (or thinks they understand) 0-60 times for cars. But when you start talking about multi-level caches single-level cell memory and the shingled magnetic recording debacle and get down to 02031 1T00 SanDisk Flash vs 60523 1T00 SanDisk Flash chips and continuous writing performance of more than 12 GB, eyes begin to glaze over. For most consumers, it's a black bo…

> eyes begin to glaze over

This argument is not especially helpful as a defense against a claim of fraud. It does nothing to explain why you'd give reviewers devices with different performance than the devices you sell.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#18

Post by andruby »

kogepathic wrote: post #10
Const-me wrote: post #2

We only have 4 manufacturers of SSD drives who also making their own chips: Intel, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Here’s the table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solid-state_drive_manu... I tend to buy Samsung and Intel, both working well in my devices.

I thought Western Digital had vertically integrated their SSDs after the purchase of SanDisk? According to that Wikipedia list, Western Digital does manufacture their own flash, through a joint venture with Kioxia.

Also, Western Digital is looking at completely buying that Kioxia

https://www.reuters.com/technology/western-digital-advanced-...

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#19

Post by cableshaft »

This happens to video games also. Publishers give review copies with microtransactions not included, the reviewers review it, and then shortly after release they add their free-to-play garbage so they get reviews that don't take the microtransactions into account and then they add it later.

The also do it during ESRB submission to get around having to have a label that mentions in-game purchases. I'm surprised ESRB lets them get away with it, actually.

Jimquisition on it: https://youtu.be/9LeZ89_u2Gc

Article on it: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66889/publishers-delaying-mic...

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#20

Post by alias_neo »

tyingq wrote: post #8
MR4D wrote: post #6

Why is this not fraud? If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to defraud. If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds to do the same thing, you’d have a pretty good argument - especially if everyone else experienced your same situation. I’d be…

They seem emboldened by the event where they silently introduced SMR into NAS drives. That is, they didn't suffer any real consequences there, so now it's a free-for-all.

They must have lost a fair amount of sales?

I previously would never have considered buying Seagate, but since the debacle, when it came to replacing a failed drive in a ZFS array of WD Red CMR drives, I couldn't trust I'd get a drive that would actually resilver so I just replaced them all with Seagate IronWolf NAS drives.

The ops team at my work also avoids WD now, and I no longer buy WD SSDs or external drives because of this distrust.

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