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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%

#81

Post by wtallis »

justinclift wrote: post #79
wtallis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The old workaround was to turn off support for NCQ (queued) trim, instead just using standard trim. It doesn't seem to have any real downsides. :)

> It doesn't seem to have any real downsides

That depends greatly on what your software's policy for issuing Trim commands is. Partly because of the dearth of drives properly supporting queued trim, it is common for Linux distro to only run trim commands via cron job, rather than issuing them in real time during a workload.

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

#82

Post by andrewstuart2 »

We ought to have the equivalent of crowdsourced semantic versioning and CVEs for products and reviews. As a consumer, I should be able to know _easily_ if any breaking changes have happened that could render a specific set of reviews or benchmarks obsolete, and just as easily if a specific issue is resolved in future revisions.

Too often I've e.g. bought an Amazon product I've bought before, only to receive Revision 2 that doesn't fit my case any more, but that the company silently rewrote descriptions for just to keep their review score.

I understand why people want to keep their review scores, etc, and to some extent they _should_ keep them, but not at the product level, when the product changes.

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

#83

Post by Plasmoid »

dragontamer wrote: post #62
zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember when Linksys (and others) had wireless devices that worked really well in Linux. I bought 4 of them and got two different versions of the thing with radically different insides.

Someone at Linksys must have noticed that SKU X was selling really well and looked for ways to cut the cost by replacing the innards.

Eventually, online stores were putting the PCB revision number in the sale listings because people had to pick a specific rev.

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

#84

Post by sennight »

mirker wrote: post #11
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 vendo…

The most recent example of a "soft recall" would be Gigabyte's exploding PSUs. It makes you wonder how much retail outlets knew, because it is clear that Gigabyte was fully aware of the issue - and silently fixed their design.

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

#85

Post by scns »

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.

Sadly my goto Crucial started doing it too, but they paired it with a huge price drop. Was the P2 NVME IIRC. ~70€ for 1TB.

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

#86

Post by fencepost »

Dayshine wrote: post #68
dijit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked then, right?

Sounds like since all the transactions are for cosmetics that haven't been made the content simply doesn't exist in review copies.

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

#87

Post by scns »

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.

Just read that Samsung changed the BOM on 970 evo plus. Switched to the controller of the 980 pro. Test reults are mixed. 4K QD1 is up ~50->82MB/s, serial writes after exhausting SLC cache (115GB) are nearly halved 1500->800MB/s.

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

#88

Post by cwizou »

This happens a lot with flash in general, mostly because those who manufacture the end user product don't usually make the NAND (or don't always use their own).

I had the issue with "high end" USB sticks a while back during a review. The speeds given are completely irrelevant and always based on best case scenarios. And while a few manufacturers stick to the same formula for controller + NAND for the life of the product (say Sandisk), others just don't care and will silently switch both the controller and NAND with 0 indication on packaging (no rev., no nothing).

On SSDs I can't remember seeing that though, but then again, this is Western Digital we're talking about. A company best known for, let's say, being a very late entrant to the SSD market.

Edit : At least they (kinda) owned up to it after being caught, quoting the updated article : "For greater transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted,"

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

#89

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

moreati wrote: post #69
kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> discarding the outer case/USB interface

I'm not really much of a shucker but I do it from time to time. That being said, I do save the SATA board and power supply (and USB) that I get when I finish the shuck. I haven't had to yet, but it possibly could be handy for connecting up an internal 3.5" drive externally, like if I want to quickly get some data off of it or something.

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

#90

Post by wtallis »

scns wrote: post #87
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.

Just read that Samsung changed the BOM on 970 evo plus. Switched to the controller of the 980 pro. Test reults are mixed. 4K QD1 is up ~50->82MB/s, serial writes after exhausting SLC cache (115GB) are nearly halved 1500->800MB/s.

That's not what happens when you switch to a newer, faster controller. Those performance changes are what happens when you switch to newer NAND flash that's manufactured with twice the per-die capacity, so you have half as many dies for a given drive capacity. (Assuming the newer NAND isn't split into twice as many planes per die to compensate.)

Edit: Looking into this further, TechPowerUp, Computerbase and others have mistaken K90UGY8J5B for K9DUGY8J5B. It's an easy mistake to make, and I've done exactly this before. But it completely explains the performance difference. The D that changed to a 0 signifies a switch from 16 dies per package down to 8 dies per package. The digits signifying the capacity of the package have stayed the same. The "B" at the end signifying the generation has also stayed the same, but Samsung didn't introduce 512Gbit TLC dies until a generation after they introduced 256Gbit TLC dies, so on the smaller dies the "B" means 92L and on the larger dies the "B" means 128L.

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