Western Digital confirms speed crippling SN550 SSD flash change

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/western-digital-confirms-speed-crippling-sn550-ssd-flash-change/

by sharjeelsayed • 5 years ago

212 92 5 years ago

smoldesu• 5 years ago

The owners of these drives should get in contact with WD and demand they replace it with a top-of-the-line drive if they want you to keep quiet. This whole drive speed brouhahahas been sketchy from the start, but their sheepish admission of guilt here is just enterprise-grade lip service.

koala_man• 5 years ago

The company says that, in the future, it will also introduce a new model number when making any hardware changes to its products that impact performance.

So they'll keep selling products called "Western Digital SN550" running at half the speed, but you'll now be able to tell them apart by seeing the model number update from "WDBA3V0010BNC-WRSN" to e.g. "WDBA3V0011BNC-WRSN"?

This is very scummy.

Isthatablackgsd2• 5 years ago

TBF, it is common tactics for manufacturers to do this. They even have specific SKU for each retail store (Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc), including Black Friday SKUs (they are inferior/lower quality product intended for Black Friday/Cyber Monday day).

Not surprisingly that WD are going down to this route. "Shareholders is a priority over customers" is a common business mantra.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Customers so often fall for it though. I've been taken in by Black Friday deals many times.

It hurts you with rigorous buyers, but most are not that.

matheusmoreira• 5 years ago

Black Friday SKUs (they are inferior/lower quality product intended for Black Friday/Cyber Monday day)

How inferior?

everdrive• 5 years ago

including Black Friday SKUs (they are inferior/lower quality product intended for Black Friday/Cyber Monday day).

This is news to me. Can you elaborate?

handrous• 5 years ago

See also: "outlet mall" clothing.

cptskippy5• 5 years ago

The different SKUs is a way to get around price matching because they're "not the same". Black Friday SKUs are a similar tactic where the retailer can offer a raincheck knowing that SKU will never resurface.

What WD is doing hits differently and would be like LG using LED panels in the OLED*A line of TVs or if the Ford F-Series PowerStroke suddenly came with an EcoBoost engine. It betrays the trust people have in the line/model that WD has created.

Stratoscope• 5 years ago

The mattress business is notorious for this. Every mattress store offers price matching against any other mattress store... but only for the exact same item, by name!

Let's take one manufacturer, I'll call them Sorta.

One store will sell the Sorta Beautysleep, another sells the Sorta Quietrest, and a third has the Sorta Hamptonshire. All three are identical design, materials, construction, and appearance. The only difference is the label Sorta attaches before shipping to each store's distribution center.

So when you ask for a price match on that first store's Sorta Beautysleep, no price match for you! It's an exclusive product available at our store only.

cptskippy5• 5 years ago

This is very scummy.

That's been my overall opinion of WD in recent years.

I have been a supporter of WD since the 90s when I bought my first 2.5GB Caviar drive. My NAS and Server are filled with WD Reds and my gaming PC is using an WD Black NVME. I recently pulled WD Green and Blues from some systems and for the first time in 25 years used something other than WD to replace them.

WD's branding use to make it really simple to understand what you were buying. You knew what Green, Blue, Red, Purple, and Black drives were capable of and you bought accordingly.

Now it seems they're leveraging that trust and comfort to fuck people over and for what? How does disappointing your customer help your brand?

I can no longer trust them and I'm not going to invest the effort to ensure that I'm buying the right Red or Blue drive from them. It's sad but I'm just going to take my money elsewhere.

ev12• 5 years ago

I stopped trusting them when they started silently hiding SMR in existing CMR SKUs and it only took massive backlash and public calling out for them to start selling "red" and "red plus" HDs. Blatantly lied about it while people have raid arrays failing and unable to rebuild, etc.

edit: pro -> plus

userbinator3• 5 years ago

IMHO I prefer the detailed part numbers that WD used exclusively before they started using the dumbed-down colour scheme, because they give a lot more information than just "WD Black":

https://i.redd.it/4sg8kvhe1nuy.png

Unfortunately I can't seem to find one for their SSDs, which is certainly a problem.

a9h74j• 5 years ago

Think how this would play with, say, a BOM going into a medical device. Not only on regulatory grounds, but in terms of specific performance.

yencabulator2• 5 years ago

Companies such as IBM historically specialized in guaranteeing the exact BOM for long-term usage. You pay a premium for that, because they design and stock for it.

userbinator3• 5 years ago

That's the problem with "marketing names": they're dumbed-down "abstractions" created by and for "non-technical" people who don't think precision matters and so will try to get away with whatever they think they can with stretching the truth.

From that perspective, instances like this that will cause people to place less trust in the marketing names and look into the actual model numbers is a good thing.

donmcronald• 5 years ago

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.

I’ll believe that when it happens. IMO it’s fraud and after the SMR debacle everyone at Western Digital should know it’s not ok, but they still tried to sneak it by everyone.

bopbeepboop• 5 years ago

It’s absolutely fraud, at scale and across state lines.

They started selling product A, under a particular version number. They then substituted inferior product B as the same version number, deceiving customers who were attempting to buy product A.

They did this with what seems like explicit intent to trick customers attempting to buy product A into accepting the inferior product B.

I think it speaks to the overt criminality of modern businesses that they did this.

I hope we start seeing RICO and organized crime prosecutions against executives for this behavior.

sschueller• 5 years ago

They also surely didn't ship the slow units to the reviewers...

caconym_• 5 years ago

I was wondering about the legality, since this seems to me to be bald-faced fraud and part of a consistent pattern at WD and other manufacturers. I guess the sticking point is proving that they deliberately used faster components in earlier units to get good reviews?

I'm sure they've been very careful to keep their conversations on this matter off the record. If only we had a government more interested in protecting its people from corporate malfeasance.

kragen2• 5 years ago

This kind of line-extension fraud is pretty common. Pyrex used to be a brand name for borosilicate glass, the kind you can safely heat to red heat on a Bunsen burner, and became popular for home baking dishes as well. At some point Corning started selling tempered soda-lime glass in the US as "Pyrex" as well, which can explode if subjected to thermal shock, a decision that causes several cooks per year to end up covered in turkey grease and glass shards. Saran was Dow's trademark for polyvinylidene chloride, a superior chemical protective layer, which became popular as a plastic wrap as a way to preserve food against evaporation and rancidification through oxygen ingress; now Dow sells Saran Wrap that contains no Saran, instead consisting of polyethylene, which permits literally a thousand times as much oxygen through. Similarly there are lines of Sudafed that contain no pseudoephedrine, Kaopectate that no longer contains kaolin or pectin (only in the US), and so on.

In electronics, substituting inferior components after the initial launch of a product has become routine, and it isn't even always intentional fraud; the manufacturer may honestly believe the new, cheaper parts are equivalent to the original parts.

I think you will see organized crime prosecutions against executives for this behavior, but only in PRC.

theogravity• 5 years ago

Not surprised they'd hide it considering the WD Red CMR debacle where they didn't notify customers that they changed from CMR to SMR.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22875094

deckard1• 5 years ago

last I checked they still make you hunt for the CMR/SMR info on their webpage by having to match model numbers. Talk about scummy. Not to mention they did this with their NAS lineup, which is like hitting a hornet nest with a stick.

The other thing HDD manufacturers apparently lie about is RPM. WD claims their WD Red are 5400 RPM when they are actually 7200[1]. Which just seems like a ridiculous thing to obfuscate if you ask me. Most consumers still think 7200 RPM is faster/better, and those shopping for 5400 for quiet are just going to get annoyed.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/western-digital-confuses-everyone...

willis936• 5 years ago

5400 RPM is also significantly lower power/heat and more reliable.

livueta• 5 years ago

A little while ago I accidentally bought a couple SMR drives, despite knowing about the whole shitshow, despite checking the SNs, by mentally transposing one character at the end of a long SN. It's totally intentional and they can eat shit for it. I guess it was my just desserts for continuing to buy from them at all, though it's not like we're drowning in alternatives.

cptskippy5• 5 years ago

Well rather than removing SMR from the Red line, they introduced the Red Plus line which they pinkie promise won't have SMR.

WD built brand loyalty and trust around the easy branding the created with the Blue, Green, Black, Purple, and Red lines. People knew what they were getting when they bought a particular color.

Now WD is leveraging that trust to trick people into purchasing a lesser product. When they were called on it their response was "Oh well here's what you really wanted but now it's a different product line". This benefits them because customers oblivious to the controversy will still buy the inferior product thinking it's something else and not knowing better.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

I still don't get why they lied about SMR.

SMR drives aren't bad; you just need them for different applications and they require different software support.

They knew that it was going to end up badly with storage arrays that were not SMR-aware.

kstrauser• 5 years ago

That absolutely ruined WD for me. They doubled down insisting that SMR is perfectly fine for freaking NAS drives when it most certainly is not fine at all in that application. I always liked the WD Red series and bought lots of them, but the incident proved that they don't know or care what their prosumer customers actually want.

mzs• 5 years ago

Samsung now too, wonder if this is chip shortage related:

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

InitialLastName• 5 years ago

I suspect that we're starting to see a lot of products being quietly changed in subtle ways now that we're moving into ~6 months of part shortages (for reference, 6 months is about normal for lag from part purchasing to consumer availability, with substantial variation by sector). The good way to do this is be open when user-visible specs have to change, or even to release a new model. What WD is doing is the bad way.

shadilay2• 5 years ago

This doesn't have anything to do with the shortages. SSD OEM's have been doing it for years. The real reason is the NAND manufactures add more layers or change nodes.

noizejoy• 5 years ago

The Samsung case seems to be quite different, though. i.e. the replacement components don’t seem to generally make things worse.

bsharitt• 5 years ago

Between this and the SMR NAS drive debacle, I think I'm done with Western Digital for the foreseeable future.

ep103• 5 years ago

So HN, who should I be buying external HDDs from anymore? Because this is the last straw for me with WD

thg• 5 years ago

Toshiba.

babypuncher2• 5 years ago

It's a sample size of one, but the worst recent HDD I bought was a Toshiba. I got it in, and within a week I was getting SMART warnings about a high number of reallocated sectors (accompanied by strange performance characteristics.

I RMA'd the drive and the replacement had the exact same issue.

_ph_• 5 years ago

Seconded. I have many Toshiba drives, always very happy with them.

mgerdts• 5 years ago

Toshiba spun off their flash storage as Kioxia. WD and Kioxia are considering a merger.

wmf• 5 years ago

This kind of thinking won't help you. There are three HDD vendors (and not many more SSD vendors) and they've all screwed their customers multiple times.

TillE• 5 years ago

It sucks that there's no real alternative to meticulous research before any purchase, but that's how it is.

WD's recent weirdness with the Red drives has pushed me to just spend the extra money for SSDs. I've been happy with Samsung's high-end products but I'm sure there are caveats.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Backblaze publishes stats regularly. It's probably the nicest source of HDD data available on the web.

lostlogin2• 5 years ago

After the last WD episode, I went Seagate for spinning ones. They have been great, although aren’t the quietest.

I use Samsung for solid state - their Evo series are very good. The m2 Pro 980s are seriously fast.

lostlogin2• 5 years ago

... And now it seems Samsung are on a similar path with parts switching.

https://hexus.net/tech/news/storage/148295-samsung-latest-ss...

cronix• 5 years ago

Very happy with Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. It's just simply blazing fast if you're after M.2 NVMe PCIe4. I believe they're using micron memory.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-m...

Lammy• 5 years ago

who should I be buying external HDDs from

Trick question. The answer is "don't". I can't find a direct citation for external HDDs being the lowest parts-bin of drives manufactured, but the pricing tells the story enough for me.

My data is valuable enough to me that I usually spend ~twice as much on a high-end drive and put it in my own enclosure. I usually go for IronWolf drives, and I'm a big fan of ICY BOX enclosures: https://icybox.de/en/product.php?id=297

pickledcods2• 5 years ago

The thing I greatly dislike about Ironwolf is that it displays a nonsense value for the smart attribute "Raw_Read_Error_Rate". I have no idea to how to extract the actual error rate, if any.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 5 years ago

Seagate. They have a bad reputation for reliability, but my experience is that it is overblown. Keep proper backups and use the warranty if it fails within that period. If it fails outside of it chances are there are even denser drives for less money on the market anyway.

Meanwhile, they're cheap and Seagate never pulled that SMR-in-NAS-disks shit that WD and a few others did.

dragontamer3• 5 years ago

Toshiba and Seagate. Hitachi split into WD (aka HGST) and Toshiba.

This WD dumbassery seems like its mostly on the WD side. I'm not aware of any dumb decisions being made on the HGST-side of the WD company yet. It should also be noted that Sandisk is also owned by WD.

crazyjncsu• 5 years ago

Nothing new folks. 23 years ago I bought a RIVA TNT video card (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT) where early models (and, conveniently, the ones sent to reviewers) were clocked at 110Mhz. They silently clocked them down to 90Mhz after a month or so before I got mine.

“The TNT shipped later than originally planned, ran quite hot, and was clocked lower than Nvidia had planned at 90 MHz instead of 110 MHz. Originally planned specifications should have placed the card ahead of Voodoo2 in theoretical performance for Direct3D applications, but at 90 MHz it did not quite match the Voodoo2”

I’ve been a bitter man ever since…

deadmutex2• 5 years ago

I am guessing behind the scenes they probably had a target of 110Mhz. They probably hoped to hit that by launch, and sent out review units a bit early. However, whatever fix they were trying probably didn't pan out or they found another failure case in edge case testing (e.g. running it long term in places with high ambient temps), and had to throttle them down for everyone.

So, the critical mistake was probably sending out units too early.

Can totally understand how infuriating it must be because you buy based on the benchmarks, and don't get what you think you're buying.

spyder• 5 years ago

"So, the critical mistake was probably sending out units too early."

No, the critical mistake is not telling the costumers about the change.

ljhsiung• 5 years ago

I literally just bought an SN550 last week.

Any suggestions for recourse? Unlikely to be able to return it, since "technically" it's used.

travoc• 5 years ago

The retailer should accept return of a defective product. Then file a warranty claim with the manufacturer. If that doesn’t work, your credit card company might have an extended warranty claim procedure that you should start.

Finally, start leaving bad reviews of the retailer and manufacturer online. If that doesn’t get their attention, at least you might cause them to lose a few hundred thousand dollars in sales.

DiabloD32• 5 years ago

Talk to your credit card company if the retail outlet won't help you. Try to push the narrative that this is a counterfeit and is not the product as advertised.

intricatedetail• 5 years ago

If a small manufacturer did this, they'd get bankrupted and maybe in jail. I guess we still have a two tier system.

shadilay2• 5 years ago

This is such an obvious bait and switch. If we had a functioning FTC WD would be forced to refund all purchasers 2x.

BuckRogers4• 5 years ago

I saw this come across on ExtremeTech a few days ago. I believe they broke the story. It was Western Digital AND Crucial that were caught doing it.

That means you should buy Intel or Samsung products, neither of whom have been caught doing this. I was going to get a WD SN850, thinking how nice it was that an American company beat out Samsung finally on performance. The first time since Intel reigned some years ago.

But not now. I'm going with a Samsung 990 Pro when those drop later this year. Intel abandoned the high performance consumer space, but my Intel X25-M 160GB that I bought in January 2010 is still in-use to this day, and it was punished in my personal machine for 7 years straight. I would have no qualms buying anything they put out for laptops or any system that isn't my i9-11900K.

It's a real shame. American companies just don't can't think past the next quarter. I recently read that Ford has been putting plastic oil pans on trucks, and I know a guy that has a brand new one- it cracked. I've been doing my research and was determined to buy domestic but found enough stuff like that, that I'm going with Toyota from here on out, and I've never owned one before.

Crucial/Micron was one of the better quality manufacturers, it's a shame to see them lumped in with this scandal. Looking forward to an Intel Arc GPU next year paired with my Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD which will sit alongside my existing 960 1TB Pro.

I'm also looking for some more external storage, and was determined to with Sandisk-WD. I am waiting for Thunderbolt 4 drives or USB 4.0 as my system supports both, but the Seagate FireCuda USB 3.2 Gen2x2 is what I'd reach for if I needed one right away. I'll be skipping Sandisk.

If you hate America, run a company like most of them operate. No quicker way to hollow out what's left of our economy. Maybe we can just sell each other loans and insurance.

anakaine• 5 years ago

Theres an entire other story here in your comments: ford building vehicles with a plastic oil pan / sump. That it just insane, even by the standards of "engineering says it will work and be cheaper", particularly on a truck / 4x4 where off road duty can cause stones, sticks, etc to hit the sump hard. Even in a smaller vehicle lower clearances can cause that part of the vehicle to strike the road surface often enough- just have a look either side of your nearest speed bump.

Theres likely a pro in this design for North American vehicles, where the pan won't rust. I still maintain, however, that at least a metal pan will bend or dent and be serviceable whilst a hardened plastic one will tend to crack or shatter.

BuckRogers4• 5 years ago

Yup, you nailed it, impact. Metal bends. I haven't had an oil pan rust through on any of my cars, and I keep older cars than most people in the midwest. I've been here all of my life other than a 5 year stint in Texas. Never even heard a story about someone's rusting through.

And I would believe it's a wise engineering choice, if the first time I've heard about it was in regards to a 2021 truck leaking. I don't know if the other US domestic manufacturers are doing this, but you can bet they'll be right behind as they've always chased each other in a race to making the worst vehicles possible for 50 years now in the name of profits. I read a story that in the 70s GM executives heard that Ford was cutting quality/costs by 30% in some way, and demanded they "get to do" the same.

The Tacoma I'm likely to buy does have a plastic truck bed instead of stainless, which was also a surprise to me. I think everything is being cheapened up, even the Toyotas and Hondas. But I see legitimate trade offs with bed materials that could make a little more sense, much like how Ford uses aluminum beds. When Ford did that, I didn't outright scorn it like these plastic pans.

glandium• 5 years ago

Unfortunately for you Samsung has been caught doing it too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28336293

BuckRogers4• 5 years ago

Unfortunately for you, you're wrong. And worse yet, everyone who interacts with you is worse off for it. You didn't vet your source. As the title of this thread is, "Western Digital confirms speed crippling SN550 SSD flash change". Samsung has done no NAND swap, nor have they crippled performance. You're wrong on both counts.

I'm responding for the benefit of others, not yours, as you're basically presenting false information. Crucial and Western Digital were caught swapping NAND with zero other indication. Samsung has updated that SKU's serial number, product datasheet, and the actual change in question was a different Samsung controller and increased SLC cache. Not the NAND.[0]

And, they swapped the controller for a newer one, out of the 980 Pro. Almost 3-times the the SLC cache of the original model, and overall netting a small performance increase. Most people would prefer these changes over the original configuration. I would.

And while I'd be more than happy to only buy Intel products, Samsung is still in the clear on this front.

You're not on Ars Technica anymore. Don't ever come half-stepping with spreading misinformation on HN. It's a disservice to not read your own sources, and then apply your incorrect conclusion for others. You're welcome for the correction.

[0]https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-is-swapping-ssd-pa...

dfdz• 5 years ago

Since no one is discussing it, here are the technical details of the change:

once the 12 GB SLC cache is exhausted, and their [write] performance [decreases] from 610 MBps (the original speed) [to] 390Mps.

I am not saying what they did was ethical, but many consumers do not regularly write files of 12G and will not notice the change

Here is a better article describing the situation:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-blue-sn550-ssd-performa...

NullPrefix2• 5 years ago

Fictional qoute:

once the the 4GB RAM cache is exhausted, and their [write] performance [decreases] from 20GBps (the original speed) [to] 610 MBps

Western Digital confirms speed crippling SN550 SSD flash change

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