> 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"?
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.
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.
To shed some light on the matter (goto the last line for a Tl;Dr explanation):
CMR:good for everything, and NAS+RAID use. You want this one pretty much for everything.
SMR: good for light desktop work, very risky for NAS+RAID use.
Older plain Red drives are CMR and therefore good, but check that their model string contains EFRX and not EFAX because WD at one point silently started shipping SMR drives labeled as WD Red, and the only difference was the model string, which contains EFRX for CMR (good) drives and EFAX for SMR (bad) ones.
Be aware however that WD uses the model number in a very inconsistent way, for example there are new WD Red Plus models who have the EFAX designation, still are CMR drives, therefore good. Use it as indicator for older models, while newer models can be sorted out using their commercial name.
Therefore, as of today:
WD Red: those are mostly/all SMR drives. Avoid them.
WD Red Plus: those initially were the old CMR WD Red ones, simply relabeled to show the difference. Good for everything. Newer ones have a different model string now which should imply some improvement besides a plain relabeling. They're still CMR and good. Those are what I'm currently using on my home NAS.
WD Red PRO: those are high end CMR drives with better performance and durability standards than the Plus ones. Good for everything and indicated for heavy load situations. More costly however.
According to their model number decoder, the difference between --R- and --A- is the former is 5400RPM with 64MB of cache, and the latter 5400RPM with 256MB of cache. Unfortunate that they didn't change the part number to denote CMR vs SMR, and most people would rightly think that 256MB of cache is better than 64MB (but in this case it could be being used to hide the additional latency of SMR), so I think this is definitely in the area of deception.
For some reason the URLs I posted were truncated and it's too late to edit them. They were pointers to the WD Red hard drives .pdf data sheets at WD site. To find them, just search for "WD Red Data sheet".
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":
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.
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.
I've never really understood the value of price-matching. Unless you have a gift card, or one store offers free shipping, why both with a price match? Just buy from the cheaper place.
> I've never really understood the value of price-matching. Unless you have a gift card, or one store offers free shipping, why both with a price match? Just buy from the cheaper place.
Simple:
* You might trust one place to provide better ongoing service after sale - for instance in the UK John Lewis used to offer a price match ('never knowingly undersold') which would include a 2 year store warranty, while most other retailers only offered a 1 year warranty. On top of that, over time you find out which retailers will just sort your problem out when you bring it to them, while others will require you to deal with some helpline and will fob you off.
* Price-match often also applies after the sale (i.e. we will match to 14 days after the sale) which provides the promotional message of 'you don't have to worry about shopping around now - you can complete the sale and if you would have got it cheaper you can get the difference back anyway'. This is also an additional customer price guarantee if an item goes on sale or is discounted immediately after purchase.
* If you see a store online nearby that has better pricing, you can avoid the trip to the other store, or alternatively you may be able to visit your local store. If price-matching and buying multiple items, this may also mean that you can get all your items from one shop without having to visit multiple.
* You might be able to get a better sales experience from a certain store - for instance I used price-match the other day on a monitor I was looking to purchase, because my local electronics store was more expensive but I knew that they would have a working sample out on display (while the other cheaper shop would just have it in the stock room, and it would be a faff to actually see the item).
For the stores, it is also about 'loyalty'. If a customer always buys their electronics from your store, you don't want them going and shopping with your competitors.
If one place is walking distance and will price-match, it doesn't make sense to even start the car let alone drive elsewhere.
In a different vein, when I was younger my mom price-matched a TV at Best Buy against a lower price at the Future Shop across the street, it was about $50 on a $1100 unit. We went to Best Buy first, found the TV we liked, then went across the road to see if there were any better/cheaper options. We ended up going back to Best Buy because the sales people actually seemed to give a damn about their job and the customer, and the fact they were not paid commission (unlike Future Shop), all combined with the price matching made it the more appealing decision. IIRC the BB extended warranty was a better deal.
It's useful if you have a local store you like, with good customer service, that does price matching. It means you get the cheaper price but the better experience.
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.
Stock issues and often prices in store and online don't match, frequently they're independent systems. Home Depot uses the same system and still maintains different prices.
Usually its not easy to tell. There are often less ports and other obvious features, but who knows whats inside. I dont think anyone has ever done a component level breakdown like they do for storage.
>These derivative models are toned down versions of standard ones, perhaps offering a reduced number of HDMI ports or lower quality components. However, it's hard to say -- it can even be hard to tell which specific TVs are derivatives, requiring a careful scan of a model number which could total eight or nine digits.
While this happens on TVs (and other consumer goods, mattresses is another example of different SKUs for different retailers), this is not common at all for performance sensitive components in PC hardware industry.
Making different SKUs (with same generic marketing name) can happen (which WD did NOT do here) for good reasons, but most of the time you get better performance out of it.
What WD did is really shameful and very much not the norm in this industry.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I didn't realize that Saran wrap changed formulations. I just did some googling[0] and apparently it was because the original material emitted chlorine and other unspecified toxic chemicals when burned in municipal incinerators.
Yeah, just like PVC pipes, PVDC emits HCl, chlorine, and organochlorides if you burn it. (Not as nasty as the cyanides that come from burning meat, but still nasty.) But they stopped selling it everywhere, not just places that have municipal incinerators, and (just as with WD) they didn't change the name.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately... it turns out WD is lying to you about 5400 RPM as well. A lot of those 5400 RPM drives are just lower-performance 7200 RPM drives. So you end up eating the power-costs and noise for no actual benefit.
This company has consistently screwed its customers over for short-term gain over and over again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Although the new version's SLC cache is 173% bigger, it offers 47% lower sustained write performance."
So depending on your use case it can be a significant performance difference. Did you read your source?
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!
"As per the result, the old version started at 1,750 MBps and eventually dropped down to 1,500 MBps after the 40GB mark. On the new version, the drive steadily performed at 2,500 MBps, but once the 115GB SLC cache was exhausted, the SSD fell to 800 MBps."
If you're unhappy about 1,750MBps->2,500MBps performance increases for <=115GB transfers, by all means, be upset. For me, and I think any reasonable person, this is an improvement for most users that don't typically work with >115GB contiguous transfers.
And in their own test with a 154GB video file-
"At the end of the day, everything balanced out and the new version finished the copying process just a hairline faster than the old version."
Now I'm just having to repeat myself. Everyone can make their own determination. I don't really care what you buy honestly. If you find their SKU update and changes as fraudulent, file a lawsuit or wage an online crusade against Samsung. I don't see it, believe it's unfounded and won't be joining you in your quest. Good luck to you.
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.
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
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.
Seagate has used an odd encoded value for this for years. You're attempting to read a raw value, which is meant for Seagate's internal tools. This is all documented.
smartctl knows how to parse it, it just never does by default (a long-standing bug that isn't high priority enough to fix).
Do `smartctl -a -v 1,raw48:54 /dev/xxx`, or `-v 7,raw48:54` for raw seek.
However, these values have never been useful to diagnose a drive as failing before data corruption appears (and it gets kicked of a raid), in my experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could be a sample size of one though. One of the most important things for hard drives is to keep them protected. If your shipping company screws up (see Amazon) and drops the box hard on your front porch, you may end up with a broken drive.
AKA: The issue could very well not be the hard drive manufacturer, but instead the company that delivered your hard drives to you. I prefer to pick up hard drives physically from Microcenter for this reason, it means that I can properly "baby" those fragile drives all the way home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.