News WD Blue SN550 SSD Performance Reportedly Cut In Half When SLC Runs Out

[Admin]

New report claims that Western Digital has swapped the NAND flash on its Blue SN550 SSD that negatively affects its performance.

WD Blue SN550 SSD Performance Reportedly Cut In Half When SLC Runs Out : Read more

 

[PsyaNyde]

Phew, not that i'd notice, but I got the older version

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Can you spell junk?

 

[RodroX]

Is getting harder and harder to keep and eye for everything thats going on with this "part swapping".

Similar to what Gigabyte did with its exploding PSU, getting stuff from anywhere (not testing a thing of course, I mean I wana believe they didn't test a thing) and then forcing costumers to buy their Frankestein along with for example a GPU... cough newegg, cough, cough.

One start to wonder, What else is going on that we don't even know about it?

 

[hotaru251]

why i may pay more, but at least Samsung doesnt do this crap.

 

[plateLunch]

Well at least the pricing is fair. On Newegg, both the Blue 500 GB SN550 and Green 480 GB SN350 are priced at the same at $54.99.

 

[San Pedro]

why i may pay more, but at least Samsung doesnt do this crap.

Yet....

I helped a friend buy/build a PC on the weekend, and we ended up going with a Samsung 980 for a bit more over the SN500, and this makes that seem like a very wise choice, though he probably would never notice the difference in performance.

 

[Krotow]

At least WD Black seems not affected with this plague yet.

why i may pay more, but at least Samsung doesnt do this crap.

Not yet. If semiconductor shortages will continue in next year, who knows.

 

[ヴワル]

Well..., okay, just gotta stick to Samsung.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Samsung 1TB 980 - $120
SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB - $115
WD 1TB Blue SN550 - $100

Why would you have even considered the SN550 in the first place? The price difference between it, and the much better SK Hynix Gold P31 and the Samsung 980 is relatively miniscule, but the performance is so much better. There's not many places in a build where spending $15-$20 can result in a major performance increase.


1TB Performance Results and Conclusion - Samsung 980 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Going DRAMless with V6 V-NAND (Updated) | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

 

[cryoburner]

Why would you have even considered the SN550 in the first place? The price difference between it, and the much better SK Hynix Gold P31 and the Samsung 980 is relatively miniscule, but the performance is so much better. There's not many places in a build where spending $15-$20 can result in a major performance increase.

In terms of real-world performance, not just some synthetic benchmarks, the vast majority of people won't perceive a performance difference between any of those drives. For most use cases, even a SATA SSD should provide very similar performance, as the system will typically be waiting on something other the storage device most of the time.

Just look at the game load test for example. Who is going to notice a half-second difference in a 10 second load time between the Samsung 980 and the WD SN550? There's not going to be any perceptible difference there.

Aside from things like copying large files or transferring them between two fast drives, the typical user is not likely to see a significant difference in transfer rates or responsiveness between any of these drives. And as that review points out, for large file writes that exceed the drive's cache, the (original) WD SN550 actually performed better at that metric, while the Samsung 980 dropped to around 430MB/s once its write cache was exceeded, meaning its sustained write performance was already similar to what the downgraded SN550 does.

It could be argued that the 980 is a better drive overall, but it's highly unlikely that one would notice a "major performance increase" outside of certain benchmarks. Reviewers like to highlight the performance differences in synthetic tests in their reviews, but for common workloads, most SSDs tend to perform rather similar.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Yet....

I helped a friend buy/build a PC on the weekend, and we ended up going with a Samsung 980 for a bit more over the SN500, and this makes that seem like a very wise choice, though he probably would never notice the difference in performance.

980 has no dram so once the slc runs out the performance will also be greatly reduced.

 

[Krotow]

Just look at the game load test for example. Who is going to notice a half-second difference in a 10 second load time between the Samsung 980 and the WD SN550? There's not going to be any perceptible difference there.

Aside from things like copying large files or transferring them between two fast drives, the typical user is not likely to see a significant difference in transfer rates or responsiveness between any of these drives. And as that review points out, for large file writes that exceed the drive's cache, the (original) WD SN550 actually performed better at that metric, while the Samsung 980 dropped to around 430MB/s once its write cache was exceeded, meaning its sustained write performance was already similar to what the downgraded SN550 does.

Talking about game texture loading from drive into GPU memory and some other related uses like video encoding, I wait how RTX IO and DirectStorage support in Nvidia drivers will turn out.

Copying speed in real world is directly affected by file and directory count in copied data. Even between fast NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD drives few large files like videos or ISO images will be copied 10+ times faster than a bunch of random directories with a ton of tiny files inside.

 

[hotaru251]

At least WD Black seems not affected with this plague yet.



Not yet. If semiconductor shortages will continue in next year, who knows.

they likely wont.
they have their high, mid, and low tier ssd to cover market fields.

and they already charge premium so they'd keep same parts and take advantage of the others to attract more customers.


it would hurt their brand a lot to do this (and unlike many others their brand is not just in memory/storage space)

 

[gang13]

In terms of real-world performance, not just some synthetic benchmarks, the vast majority of people won't perceive a performance difference between any of those drives. For most use cases, even a SATA SSD should provide very similar performance, as the system will typically be waiting on something other the storage device most of the time.

Just look at the game load test for example. Who is going to notice a half-second difference in a 10 second load time between the Samsung 980 and the WD SN550? There's not going to be any perceptible difference there.

Aside from things like copying large files or transferring them between two fast drives, the typical user is not likely to see a significant difference in transfer rates or responsiveness between any of these drives. And as that review points out, for large file writes that exceed the drive's cache, the (original) WD SN550 actually performed better at that metric, while the Samsung 980 dropped to around 430MB/s once its write cache was exceeded, meaning its sustained write performance was already similar to what the downgraded SN550 does.

It could be argued that the 980 is a better drive overall, but it's highly unlikely that one would notice a "major performance increase" outside of certain benchmarks. Reviewers like to highlight the performance differences in synthetic tests in their reviews, but for common workloads, most SSDs tend to perform rather similar.

I mostly agree.
But with DirectStorage coming its way, I think people are paying more dollars just to get peace of mind, to get a 'future proof' ssd.

The point is 980 is 2.5 times faster in 4k read/write than SN550.
Will 980 be significantly faster than SN550 when DirectStorage comes?
Maybe, maybe not. But no harm in paying a little extra now than buying another ssd later.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

In terms of real-world performance, not just some synthetic benchmarks, the vast majority of people won't perceive a performance difference between any of those drives. For most use cases, even a SATA SSD should provide very similar performance, as the system will typically be waiting on something other the storage device most of the time.

Just look at the game load test for example. Who is going to notice a half-second difference in a 10 second load time between the Samsung 980 and the WD SN550? There's not going to be any perceptible difference there.

Aside from things like copying large files or transferring them between two fast drives, the typical user is not likely to see a significant difference in transfer rates or responsiveness between any of these drives. And as that review points out, for large file writes that exceed the drive's cache, the (original) WD SN550 actually performed better at that metric, while the Samsung 980 dropped to around 430MB/s once its write cache was exceeded, meaning its sustained write performance was already similar to what the downgraded SN550 does.

It could be argued that the 980 is a better drive overall, but it's highly unlikely that one would notice a "major performance increase" outside of certain benchmarks. Reviewers like to highlight the performance differences in synthetic tests in their reviews, but for common workloads, most SSDs tend to perform rather similar.

It is true to an extent, but this is where the PCMark 10 Full test comes in, because in 2021 it's much more common to have a single large SSD instead of a boot drive and a games drive. Also, if you're someone who works with programs with lots of files, be it Adobe, Office, LibreOffice, GIMP, Clip Studio Paint, or what have you, you will benefit from the additional performance capabilities of the slightly more expensive drives.

Plus, of course, with Samsung you're getting a drive where they made the flash and the controller, with SK Hynix you're getting a drive where they made the flash, with WD they bought both and assembled them.

 

[martinch]

Plus, of course, with Samsung you're getting a drive where they made the flash and the controller, with SK Hynix you're getting a drive where they made the flash, with WD they bought both and assembled them.

Aren't the memory and controller in WD SSDs made by SanDisk, who were bought by WD some time ago..?

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Aren't the memory and controller in WD SSDs made by SanDisk, who were bought by WD some time ago..?

You're right, for some reason I thought they were using a Phision controller. Long and hot days fry the mind.

 

[SethNW]

So I guess I can't recommend WD anymore, considering their garbage level attitude towards consumers, because this is only right way to describe hidden switcheroo like that, you never know when they will backstab you again. So they can join ADATA in group of companies doing crappy practices.

 

[Krotow]

So I guess I can't recommend WD anymore.

Except WD Black. WD budget and mid level SSDs now are junk drives for real.

 

[Kaczorowaty]

Except WD Black. WD budget and mid level SSDs now are junk drives for real.

WD Black SN750 is downgraded as well.

This is my New WD Black SN750 1 TB

WDS100T3X0C-00SJG0

FW 111130WD

And Yes it's almost 3 time slower in write speed..