Note that it's not just SSDs that can have completely different components on the same part. I've seen many USB wifi dongles with the same model number use completely different wifi chips internally.
Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#62Why 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…
One might argue that the changes are marginal and most users won't be affected by them. This change hurts write throughput for large write workloads, but these workloads are rare anyway.
If you change the specs, people expect your SKU to change. Don't call it the SN550 anymore. Call it the SN551.
There's a whole slew of internet benchmarks on the SN550 and how it performs on a wide variety of benchmarks. For WD to muddle their branding by calling this new, slower drive ALSO an SN550, weakens the brand and causes distrust in builders.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#63This 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 l…
One of the latest events like this is Capcoms Resident Evil Village which launched with a DRM that added terrible stuttering to the PC version. They only admitted to this and promised a fix when a cracked version came out that had the DRM removed and it didn’t have any stuttering [1]. [1] https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-la...
The folks at Digital Foundry did a phenomenal job breaking down the specifics, as usual. I strongly suggest checking out their video if you're interested in the stuff:
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#64We 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…
Are 860s new? They are what's in my system and while I don't remember when I upgraded it was definitely pre-COVID...
[edit]
smart says they have 631 days of power-on time, so maybe 2019?
[edit]
I seem to remember having issues a while back but I haven't seen any since I upgraded my firmware to RVT04B6Q
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this number correct? SSD with cache full can drop to speeds slower than spinning disk drives?
The low end of QLC is low . https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...
Reading those specs... I don't see any reason to buy it. It is worse than my current 1 TB WD Blacks (spinning disk, not SSD). And much more expensive too! I feel disappointed now... I was hoping SSDs would have been improved by now enough to make them good value for money for someoen that needs crazy amounts of storage.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#66Why 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…
> But when you start talking about multi-level caches...
No, this is not the point.
The average buyer knows very little about cars or buildings but is protected by regulation.
Consumers should not need to be expert to be protected.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#67This 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 l…
What are those microtransactions doing? Crypto mining?
"Microtransaction" means small purchases. Such as buying a randomized pack of in-game unlocks for $1 each.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#68This 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 l…
I work on an upcoming free to play game, we will have microtransactions on cosmetics and possibly new character archetypes. Microtransactions are not in the early builds of the game because we literally hadn't made the content for it yet, we were focusing on the game mechanics. The store is a lot of work in a game, and the cosmetics themselves are mostly content work which is not hyper critical to have in place (unli…
You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked then, right?
I don't think people are talking about cosmetic micro-transaction though.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For anyone else unfamiliar: shucking is buying a USB harddrive purely for the drive inside, discarding the outer case/USB interface https://www.datahoards.com/whats-the-meaning-of-shucking-a-h...
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#70I think I'm done with WD from now on. The whole WD MyBooklive remote factory result fiasco annoyed me as well - for those impacted they offered a 40% discount on one of their new MyBookLive devices, as long as you send the old drive back (shipping paid by user).