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Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

arstechnica.com

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Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#121

Post by CamperBob2 »

qwertox wrote: post #12
_red wrote: post #3

Hey Ars, there is a global chip shortage right now. I doubt Samsung is doing this to screw over their customers, rather its either this or nothing. I know Ars knows this because they allude to in bottom of article. Click-baity.

"Dear customers: Due to the current chip shortage we see ourselves in the position to have to swap the controller with one of lesser value which has degraded write speeds, they are 22% slower. Please consider this when modifying your raid setup and treat them as different products. Our pricing has been reduced to reflect this change." vs Let's change the controller and hope nobody notices.

That's basically what is being done by auto manufacturers. If you buy certain car models right now, you will get a manually adjustable steering column and a promise to install the motors later.

That second part is what's important. Downgrading the feature without notifying the customer and arranging to correct the shortfall later is pretty terrible.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#122

Post by PixelOfDeath »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #114
PixelOfDeath wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/pric…

What's your definition of "high capacity"? The biggest SMR drives I can buy are 6TB or 8TB. The biggest non-SMR drive I can buy is 18TB.

Harder to find because they obviously do not market this things towards consumers. Except when selling consumers SMR drives without telling them. ;)

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#123

Post by wtallis »

wmf wrote: post #115
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if that’s true they are the same memory, and I don’t know if the other posters are correct. 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-provisione…

Consumer SSDs don't have a a lot of overprovisioning. For example, a 1 TB SSD will never have more than 1 TiB of flash. Server SSDs are a different story.

> a 1 TB SSD will never have more than 1 TiB of flash

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.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#124

Post by vidarh »

darksaints wrote: post #92
reacharavindh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A serious question. I use a “Smart TV” without any internet connectivity whatsoever. Never let it connect to my WiFi, neither did I connect Ethernet. This way I am happily enjoying a high quality “dumb TV” that I always wanted. 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?!)

I have a smart tv and I don't like the fact that it connects to the internet...but would it be any better if I had a dumb tv and a fire stick? Honest question...I don't really know the difference.

It's better in the sense that if it starts pulling shit that goes one step too far for you, throwing a FireTV stick away is less of a sacrifice than junking the entire TV. That's my main reason for wanting to keep things separate.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#126

Post by grumpyprole »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #106
option_greek wrote: post #31

I used to work in their SSD vertical on the software side. For what it's worth, SSD/memory business unit is their pride. They never used to cut corners and do rigorous testing to ensure their customers aren't screwed over. Even when a bad batch of SSDs were shipped by mistake, they would recall/refund all of them proactively. When ever a new model is released, they would first ship limited units to a set of SSD enthu…

A better contrast is the night and day difference between Samsung SSDs and Samsung SD cards. The former are among best in class and the latter are among the worst in class and notorious for dying mighty fast in Raspberry Pis and DSLRs (going read-only). (Best SD cards are probably from Sandisk.)

Is this anecdotal? I had two sandisk cards die in a Samsung Galaxy phone in succession. I've never had a problem since I switched to using Samsung SD cards.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#127

Post by ziml77 »

maccard wrote: post #84
jrockway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think Samsung's consumer SSDs are up there. I have two and they're great. But, there is no "sort by highest quality first" option on Newegg or Amazon, and their happy customers are already happy with their SSDs. (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…

Even if they did review them well, most reviews are samples provided by manufacturer, and are performed on a single unit typically. If a manufacturer is willing to swap components in batches of products, they're willing to try to cheat reviewers too.

It's important for reviewers to keep their eye on what people are saying about a product. I after they review something, user reviews don't line up, they should purchase a unit themselves and redo their testing. If the testing shows a change, then they should both shame the company and stop accepting review units from that division of the company so they can be sure they're not getting hand-picked samples.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#128

Post by ComputerGuru »

grumpyprole wrote: post #126
ComputerGuru wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better contrast is the night and day difference between Samsung SSDs and Samsung SD cards. The former are among best in class and the latter are among the worst in class and notorious for dying mighty fast in Raspberry Pis and DSLRs (going read-only). (Best SD cards are probably from Sandisk.)

Is this anecdotal? I had two sandisk cards die in a Samsung Galaxy phone in succession. I've never had a problem since I switched to using Samsung SD cards.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. Sandisk Extreme, in particular. It’s not anecdotal but “common knowledge” in certain circles. I believe the more recent Samsung SD cards are better, but the older ones were basically notorious.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#129

Post by upbeat_general »

shadilay wrote: post #53
option_greek wrote: post #31

I used to work in their SSD vertical on the software side. For what it's worth, SSD/memory business unit is their pride. They never used to cut corners and do rigorous testing to ensure their customers aren't screwed over. Even when a bad batch of SSDs were shipped by mistake, they would recall/refund all of them proactively. When ever a new model is released, they would first ship limited units to a set of SSD enthu…

It's data storage so it absolutely has to work every time . No one would buy a faulty SSD that loses their data.

Well not exactly. People buy hard drives that are known to fail earlier than others and SSDs that wear out quicker than others.

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.

Re: Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

#130

Post by upbeat_general »

wmf wrote: post #103
londons_explore wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All manufacturers multi-source parts. 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.

All manufacturers multi-source parts. 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.

The new controller is still a samsung controller. Just a newer one.
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