Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/samsung-seemingly-caught-swapping-components-in-its-970-evo-plus-ssds/

315 129 5 years ago

jrockway2• 5 years ago

That's one way to deal with the counterfeiting problem -- just counterfeit your own devices! It's what the "sort by lowest price first" market demands, I guess.

est31• 5 years ago

Is Samsung the lowest price manufacturer? I've thought those are other manufacturers, and Samsung distinguishes itself through quality instead.

simonh• 5 years ago

They do have good R&D and some pretty nice technology, that side of the business is solid, but their product divisions will frequently cut some pretty severe corners to get stuff out on time regardless of whether it's ready or not.

jrockway2• 5 years ago

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 something as complex as an SSD. So unless the option on the ecommerce site is "sort by what Anandtech thinks about this", you are probably just sorting by a random and easily-manipulated number.)

scns2• 5 years ago

It the last years Samsung where the ones to beat in the SSD space. Higher price and higher perfomance, which can be measured but seldom felt in day to day operations, so i opted to save some bucks and bought Crucial SSDs.

_red2• 5 years ago

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.

jmartinpetersen• 5 years ago

No, that's a false dichotomy. They could've just made up a new name for it.

_red2• 5 years ago

I work in hardware design. Almost all ICs are very very limited supply. In our own case we had to move from 512K MCU to 256K simply because lead times are now until Dec 2022 on the 512K version.

I'm really surprised this hasn't bubbled-up to normies yet. I suspect this Christmas is going to be a shocker.

vosper• 5 years ago

With is what WD are doing, having just been caught changing parts in a way that impacts performance

A Western Digital spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the company had replaced the NAND flash and updated the firmware in the WD Blue SN550 beginning in June 2021 and updated the drive's data sheet to reflect the changes. "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"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/silent-changes-to-we...

qwertox• 5 years ago

"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."

Let's change the controller and hope nobody notices.

freemint• 5 years ago

The controller isn't slower in general though. I see it more as a problem of review sites not tracking revision numbers. It still reaches the advertised claims on the box. If you want to make decisions on information the manufacturer doesn't provide to you it is your responsibility to check that you are comparing the right revisions.

CamperBob2• 5 years ago

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.

hippari• 5 years ago

So why are they not dropping the price ? Putting out notice ? Rebranding ?

sundvor• 5 years ago

The 970 Evo Minus sounds a lot more to the point.

I have 2tb version bought last year, works great - but will opt for 980 Pro instead should I need more now.

(Have a 1tb version of that too, when it first came out. Works well but honestly there's no difference between the two even with pcie4).

dkbrk• 5 years ago

Does anyone have a list of SSD manufacturers that don't do this? Are SK Hynix and Intel still reliable?

londons_explore2• 5 years ago

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.

wmf5• 5 years ago

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.

proto-n• 5 years ago

Linus and Luke (of ltt) had a brief discussion about this on yesterday's WAN show [1], might be somewhat relevant. They mention intel and sk hynix as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w3biMwl9m4&t=1584s

amelius• 5 years ago

Do we now have to place our SSDs in raid configuration to get reliability? The problem is that I don't have enough slots.

wmf5• 5 years ago

This story has nothing to do with reliability.

PixelOfDeath10• 5 years ago

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.

llampx• 5 years ago

Do you have any recommendations? How does the price per TB compare?

PixelOfDeath10• 5 years ago

I got myself a used pm1725b (PCI-E v3 8x) with 3.2TB for 400€.

It hat ~350TB written, and according to Samsung is rated for 3 full device writes per day for 5 years = 17280 TB. So I have some wriggle room left.

They use lots of capacitors to hold written data in a dram and flush it out to flash on sudden power down. So they can optimize write operations for speed and low flash wear. Write speed and endurance is the part where consumer SSDs suck more and more ass.

Annoyingly many sellers do not put up the written amount of data. But I think that is more out of ignorance and less to try to dump worn down devices.

fomine3• 5 years ago

U.2 to PCIe mounter or U.2 to M.2 cable is fine.

PixelOfDeath10• 5 years ago

I would not trust a cheap chinese PCI-E to U.2 connector. And used SAS cards become kind of hot and need active cooling. So why not just directly go for a PCI-E SSD?

shadilay5• 5 years ago

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.

gruez2• 5 years ago

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!"

PixelOfDeath10• 5 years ago

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.

wmf5• 5 years ago

Or you could... not buy QLC.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

So basically they're defrauding consumers..

bserge• 5 years ago

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 old ones going?

Is anyone even bothering to desolder older generation chips like Intel 9xxx CPUs and nVidia 10xx GPUs and even RAM?

It has always seemed weird to me, but now that building a desktop has become more expensive than it should be it just seems insane.

yellow_lead• 5 years ago

Ones with good GPUs are being bought, chopped/stripped, and sold on eBay / Craigslist. My observation, anyways.

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

Yes, why does the chip shortage only effect high end card/car chips. I would be pretty darn surprised if laptop/smartphones have less number of chips than cars, still the former industry doesn't seem to be affected by chip shortage even though they sell a lot more pieces for lot less price so the later industry would be willing to pay more per chip.

maccard4• 5 years ago

I'm an uninformed consumer but if I had to guess chip binning plays a huge part in the availability of parts. If a production line can produce X chips per day with 20% highest quality, 30% "mid range" and 40% "low end" (with 10% waste) you'll have 2x as many low end chips available as high end ones.

wmf5• 5 years ago

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.

bede• 5 years ago

As a legal layman, is this possible class action territory?

stingraycharles• 5 years ago

IANAL, but I believe that as long as they reach their advertised speeds, they’re fine. Alternatively, you would need to prove malicious intent to deceive the benchmarks; but I can see Samsung make the argument for “we had to change to different $supplier because of chip shortage, and we incremented the revision number accordingly, and still reach advertised speeds”.

b1122• 5 years ago

According to article, all performance tests, and claims, seem to come from one Chinese reviewer.

One person.

If so, this is highly irresponsible. The language (likely, seems to, may be) in the article only highlights this.

There seems to be no attempt to contact Samsung either.

Really?!?

Edit: The cynic in me, wonders of this single review was paid for, to make WD look "less bad".

A review / story with no proof, only one person reporting it, no attempt to contact samsung, and I see many here assume it is 100% verified as true.

Sure takes the heat off of wd a bit...

gkanai• 5 years ago

Samsung has admitted the action and has committed to changing the product model number if this happens again.

b1122• 5 years ago

Source?

All articles I can find, are just "seemingly" reporting, none confirmed, almost all identical, all based upon one user, like the article from this post.

lvs• 5 years ago

Something doesn't line up here. The "old" model number in the ars piece is given as MZVLB1T0HBLR, which corresponds to a PM981a according to Samsung's website. Was that ever sold as a 970 Evo Plus?

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/ssd/client-ssd/MZVLB1T...

davb• 5 years ago

It would seem to be the case. lshw reports the controller on my 970 Evo Plus as "NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983"

option_greek3• 5 years ago

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 enthusiasts including gamers in Korea. One such time, there was a BSOD reported by a single tester in some edge case - > they sent a lot of team members in person to chase and fix that issue.

So I really doubt they would do anything stupid to get some quick bucks at the cost of reputation.

On the other hand, their smart tv division is absolute garbage and employees themselves wouldn't buy Samsung TVs.

treyfitty• 5 years ago

Samsung’s pride and butter is their SSD group? I find that hard to believe… they provide a range of products, including cars (they dominate the SKorean auto market), as well as financial services (in S Korea).

In America, they have TVs, and cell phones. I find it very hard to believe SSDs are their pride and butter

nitinreddy88• 5 years ago

America doesn’t represent world. In asian countries, Samsung and WD controls almost entire SSD market

bluerival• 5 years ago

What is pride and butter?

option_greek3• 5 years ago

To be specific Samsung Electronics group's than Samsung the parent company as there are several verticals apart from Electronics.

sho_hn• 5 years ago

Samsung does not dominate the South Korean car market. They own an important supplier in Harman and they're doing their best to sell automotive grade SKUs of their Exynos SoCs, but they don't act significantly as an OEM or anything.

leokennis• 5 years ago

How are Samsung Smart TV’s garbage? I mean, they have ads and crap in some markets but so do all their competitors.

I have a Samsung TV which has great picture quality, decent design and plenty of useful options for a very reasonable price.

option_greek3• 5 years ago

In meant in terms of durability and quality. We used to by a lot of Samsung electronics (along with TVs) through employee discounts and the failure rates among the TVs are always high. So much so that we used to joke about that there is a "if condition" that some how causes the pcb to fail in first month after first year (TVs used to have 1 year warranty).

PixelOfDeath10• 5 years ago

Samsung will give updates for a maximum of 5 years. So all the security holes or missing root certificates (for HTTPS connections) of the integrated browser stagnate after that.

Then you have to use a raspberry PI or some other mini computer to get the same use out of it. And then why use a "smart" TV in the first place?

gambiting3• 5 years ago

The latest series has an issue with stuttering when watching live TV, hundreds of pages of complaints on their own and other forums, and Samsung has officially replied that yes, the issue exists, but they won't fix it. I know at least 3 people who have bought Samsung TVs in the last year and they all returned them due to this very issue.

shadilay5• 5 years ago

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

upbeat_general2• 5 years ago

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.

conradfr• 5 years ago

Sad as their dumb TVs were (are) great.

reacharavindh4• 5 years ago

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?!)

comprev• 5 years ago

My TV required connectivity during setup and then removed the config afterwards. About a week later I noticed the "home screen" showing adverts and somehow the Android TV had "auto-magically" reconnected. Had to change the WiFi password to avoid reconnecting.

That reaffirmed my stance on Smart TVs remaining dumb in my house. Netflix through the Xbox only!

wickoff• 5 years ago

I watch YouTube and play music through my TV. I have no choice.

fortran77• 5 years ago

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?!)

Why are people complaining about Smart TVs in a thread about SSD?

darksaints• 5 years ago

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.

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

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.

ComputerGuru2• 5 years ago

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.)

grumpyprole• 5 years ago

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.

bayindirh• 5 years ago

I'm using a Samsung SD card on my OrangePi Zero for more than a year 7/24/365, and it's very stable so far.

However, nothing is as durable as SanDisk and Sony high end (Extreme Pro in SanDisk terminology) cards. My old CF is still kicking and a pair of 64GB cards in my mirrorless doesn't care what I pump into them (all of them are SanDisk).

45ure• 5 years ago

The downgrades seem to be prevalent across the Evo (Plus) range, for a while now. I got burnt twice, on two different microSD cards -- one was for a Raspberry Pi (64GB) in Jan 2020, and another quite recently for my S20 (128GB). The 256GB version was not affected by the downgrade to a lower write speed.

Initially, the changes in lower write speeds from 90MB/s to 60MB/s were not communicated, either through a press release, or via the specs on the Samsung site. However, it was eventually updated, i.e. the change of letters indicating different model numbers: MB-MCxxxGA vs MB-MCxxxHA, the latter suggesting a new '2020 model' with inferior write speeds.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210521102732/https://www.oempc...

KingOfCoders• 5 years ago

Not sure why you would burn your top brand.

kasabali• 5 years ago

They've been demoting their brands since 980 PRO (which should've been actually called 980 EVO by all means)

h2odragon• 5 years ago

This story (different publisher) was linked here yesterday; they comments I saw were all "This must be bullshit, Samsung would only inline upgrades", etc.

shadilay5• 5 years ago

Imagine trying to ship a hardware product and then having these changes snuck in. Functionally it's no different than counterfeiting for companies with these SSD's in their BOM. Just plain fraudulent.

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

Meh. Most consumers haven't done anything to need or deserve 1/100 of this performance

scns2• 5 years ago

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 significantly from WD silently changing the Blue drive from TLC (okay with Cache) to QLC which nets you write speeds lower than HDDs after the cache is full. Crucial did TLC->QLC on the P2 too, but you could get those drives for 30% less up until a week ago.

(edit) forgot to mention ADATA who switched the controller of their SX8200 Pro [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28320640 [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-xpg-sx8200-pro-contr...

shanoaice2• 5 years ago

(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.

M277• 5 years ago

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 editors. (The old version would get a speed reduction to 1500MB/s after overflowing the SLC cache (42GB), the new one goes down to 800MB/s after overflowing (115GB))

P.S.: Not defending this, just clarifying because most posters here seem to believe it's a straight up downgrade. Should also be worth noting that Samsung changed the product box, product number, firmware version and the spec sheet for this change. So they're significantly better than the others who have done similar moves. That said, I still believe that they should have called this the 971 Evo+ or something, as it's genuinely different.

[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/286008/et-tu-samsung-samsung-too...

belltaco• 5 years ago

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.

shanoaice2• 5 years ago

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.

cwizou2• 5 years ago

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.

SV_BubbleTime• 5 years ago

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-provisioned for storage space.

OneLeggedCat• 5 years ago

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.

biaachmonkie• 5 years ago

What Samsung should have done it change the name and call it the "971 Evo Plus SSD" or "970 Evo Gold SSD" or some such change that distinguishes this new product with different performance characteristics than the actual "970 Evo Plus SSD".

But no they want to benefit from the good name and customer perception of the "970 Evo Plus SSD" while selling a substantially different product under that name. That is fraudulent behavior!

mjw1007• 5 years ago

I wonder if there's scope for dealing with this sort of situation in trademark law.

That is, maybe we could make the law say "if you want to be able to use the courts to limit the use of your brand name, you have to follow certain rules about when you can use the same model name for different products".

cwizou2• 5 years ago

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.

Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

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