Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by PixelOfDeath » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

shadilay wrote: post #54

PixelOfDeath wrote: post #14

With the introduction of QLC consumer SSDs, with worse write endurance and life time but the same price as TLC, I took a look at used enterprise SSDs and never looked back. The only issues is the connectors. You need 8x PCI-E lanes (4x might work) or a SAS connector that nearly no consumer board has.

QLC is complete trash and should never be used outside of a WORM architecture in a larger pool. That they are trying to force it on consumers is criminal. Same with SMR.

Current consumer QLC devices still do very well in read speed and especially latency. The latency often is better then on older enterprise SSDs.

Only device managed SMR is terrible. Host managed SMR is fine for data-hording if the savings in size/price are forwarded.

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

#92

Post by darksaints » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #58

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 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.

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

#93

Post by vbezhenar » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #58

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 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?!)

My LG TV is always connected to the Internet and I don't use it as a dumb device at all, its only use it to watch local Netflix-like service and Youtube.

I don't complain, though. Its smart capabilities are absolutely sufficient to me.

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

#94

Post by PixelOfDeath » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #88

gruez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>QLC is complete trash and should never be used outside of a WORM architecture in a larger pool. Not everyone is a creator editing/rendering 4k videos. For the typical surfer/office worker/gamer QLC drives are fine because they rarely need to dump 50+GB of writes at a time. What you're suggesting is basically "ban all atom processors because they're criminally slow!"

I think they were complaining about reliability. QLC cells can't handle as many writes before failing.

QLC also has shitty slow write speed. (Slower then linear writes on spinning rust!)

So consumer SSDs now depend on a limited dynamic part of flash being used as SLC to cache writes. Just that this dynamic part mostly gets smaller the fuller the device is.

And as soon as you do anything with large writes you will hit a brick wall of slowness, on full devices sooner then on empty ones.

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

#95

Post by shanoaice » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #90

M277 wrote: post #82

This is actually better for most consumers. The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold and the controller is a superior one (it now uses the same one as the 980 PRO). TechPowerUp[0] has a much better post on this, and you can clearly see there that the new one is better in most cases than the old one. The only ones disadvantaged by this change are people who constantly write >42GB which I would think are video edi…

>The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold How can they do that without reducing the overall capacity? My understanding is that part of the MLC storage in SSDs is used as an SLC cache so that it's faster, but can store only half, one third or one fourth of the data it otherwise would.

Generally SLC cache has almost no connection to the overall size of the drive. After finishing writing a huge portion of data (for example), the controller will start to move the written data out of the SLC section and turn them into normal TLC mode, releasing the SLC space for next turn of writing. When the drive usage becomes higher, some drive (apparantly Samsung's drive does) have a dynamic SLC capacity policy that will reduce the avaliable SLC space, so the disk can have enough space to store normal TLC data.

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

#96

Post by shanoaice » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

scns wrote: post #79

The reporting is this case is a little dramatized IMHO. As you can read here [0] they actually use the controller from the 980 Pro and more dense NAND, Billy Tallis from Anandtech filled in some missing technical detail. You actually gain performance in the random 4K case, which is important in day to day operations but you loose sequential write speed if you exceed the SLC-Cache of 115GB. This differs quite signific…

(OT) If my information is not wrong......the new WD SN550 drive still uses a TLC NAND (Kioxia BiCS5, which is the same NAND flash as the SN350 960GB version) but may have done some modification to the firmware/controller to lower the speed.

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

#97

Post by cwizou » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #90

M277 wrote: post #82

This is actually better for most consumers. The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold and the controller is a superior one (it now uses the same one as the 980 PRO). TechPowerUp[0] has a much better post on this, and you can clearly see there that the new one is better in most cases than the old one. The only ones disadvantaged by this change are people who constantly write >42GB which I would think are video edi…

>The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold How can they do that without reducing the overall capacity? My understanding is that part of the MLC storage in SSDs is used as an SLC cache so that it's faster, but can store only half, one third or one fourth of the data it otherwise would.

In general, there are two separate components to the SLC cache strategy (which as you said, is writing only one bit instead of 3 for TLC, because it's much faster to do so). First you have some overprovisionned NAND, the size of which depends with models. I believe it is 6 GB on this one.

Then you have what they call "intelligent turbowrite", which is a dynamically allocated/reallocated SLC cache (about 108 GB).

For both, the concept is broadly the same, your writes go into the overprovisionned "SLC cache" first, then into the dynamic one.

When the drive is idle, it will consolidate the writes of both caches as 3 bit writes, freeing the NAND for "SLC cache" use again. This can take a few minutes of idle time.

As you fill up your disk things get more complicated, you need to keep some free space to be able to consolidate your writes, the exact way this controller works in that case is not known to me, but this is an issue with every SSD that's not full SLC. Modern controllers usually are doing much better than the old ones.

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

#98

Post by cwizou » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

Previously discussed here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329386

This is massively overblown, especially the comparison to what happened at other manufacturers. Samsung announced the change, changed the packaging, and updated the specs on their site.

And they changed for a better controller (from the 980 Pro) with 4X more write queues and an improved dynamic SLC cache strategy. It is slower in one (minor) edge case but will be faster in every single other ones. If I had the choice I'd pick the new one, without question.

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

#99

Post by OneLeggedCat » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

M277 wrote: post #82

This is actually better for most consumers. The SLC cache was increased nearly three fold and the controller is a superior one (it now uses the same one as the 980 PRO). TechPowerUp[0] has a much better post on this, and you can clearly see there that the new one is better in most cases than the old one. The only ones disadvantaged by this change are people who constantly write >42GB which I would think are video edi…

> Should also be worth noting that Samsung changed the product box, product number, firmware version and the spec sheet for this change

This is yugely better than what some other SSD makers have done. ADATA for example has massively downgraded some drives, trying to sell those under the same name and part numbers as a popular good-selling drive, and done so completely silently. ADATA isn't the only one. The screaming about this situation is endless on several pc part enthusiast subreddits.

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

#100

Post by wmf » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

bserge wrote: post #22

In light of the chip shortages everyone is talking about, I've been scratching my head about all the laptops, desktops and AIOs on the market - there are millions of them, from dozens of manufacturers (or so it seems). All soldered down but using modern chips from Intel and nVidia, same chips everyone claims are in short supply. Who is buying these things? What happens to them when they're not sold? Where are all the…

The chip shortage doesn't mean no chips, just fewer. Vendors like Dell, HP, and Lenovo locked in long-term contracts with fixed pricing which enables them to still build PCs. Store shelves also show anti-survivorship bias where the stuff people want is sold out while the stuff no one wants is still on the shelves.