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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%

#21

Post by wtallis »

justinclift wrote: post #14
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 workaro…

> disabling NCQ trim

Fixed support for queued trim was part of the marketing claims for the 860 series. Whatever's going on with the 860 and newer drives requires deeper investigation, because there's plenty of reason to believe that simply applying the old workaround is not accurately targeting the real problem.

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

#24

Post by alias_neo »

justinclift wrote: post #14
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 workaro…

Thanks, I had no idea about this. I've been using Samsung drives in all of my machines and servers and I run Linux exclusively. With a mixture of 850, 860 and 870's I must be at least partially affected.

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

#25

Post by [deleted] »

leetcrew wrote: post #12
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…

[deleted]

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

#26

Post by post_break »

Ship the top tier hardware NVME drives to reviewers, wait a few months then start swapping out slower memory chips, controllers, go through multiple revisions while keeping the same name so when gamers look for reviews they see blinding speeds only to be duped. It's incredible what drive manufacturers are getting away with.

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

#27

Post by bitL »

I bought a 1TB WD Blue M.2 SSD like the one on the picture and my computer has issues booting from it when all USB devices are plugged in (x299/10980XE). It looks like more people have issues booting from it as well, based on the feedback I saw on the seller site. How can one botch SSD that way?

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

#28

Post by bserge »

aurizon wrote: post #22

Wanna buy a one legged duck? People who will want this are low end system builders who can add the "Has an SSD" who market to people have no idea how fast a 2 legged duck can run....

*fly. So it makes no difference until the duck lands :D

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

#29

Post by aurizon »

bserge wrote: post #28
aurizon wrote: post #22

Wanna buy a one legged duck? People who will want this are low end system builders who can add the "Has an SSD" who market to people have no idea how fast a 2 legged duck can run....

*fly. So it makes no difference until the duck lands :D

Maybe the duck has trouble taking off too? In effect they sell a crippled product for less $$ to the cheap system builders who market on price to people impressed by SSD, who know no better

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

#30

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

alias_neo wrote: post #20
tyingq wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

> They must have lost a fair amount of sales?

(Anecdotally) Not from me. SMR or not, their easystore drives that you can shuck are cheap. Between buying a cheap drive and buying something else, I like to spend less money, so I'd choose the easystores.

Granted, I don't know how much has changed with the easystores since the SMR debacle since I've not really been in the hard drive market for a while.

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