Western Digital Caught Bait-and-Switching Customers With Slow SSDs

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When I wrote about Crucial’s decision to swap inferior NAND flash into its products without updating the reviewer community or announcing a separate SKU, I hoped the problem was a one-off. While this has happened before, it’s typically been the exception, not the norm.

Guess that was too much to hope for. According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue — which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market — has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s (as measured by THG) to 390MB/s (as measured by Expreview). The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

ExtremeTech

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GoneToPlaid, joep517

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That is disappointing but not too surprising these days.

--Joe

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Although there is enough bad stuff going on on the Internet this is one of the reasons I love it.

Independent reviewers can not only discover when companies are behaving badly but it is very easy to get the word out and also for other reviewers to check it out to see if this is really the case. It’s a win-win for the average consumer!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
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I am not too sure how much I would trust Expreview, loads in chinese for me. ExtremeTech did not verify that test.
But if true sad I have always been a WD fan. As an aside I see their chip division is due to be sold.

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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a lot of WD’s HDDs worked well and have never failed me.
I guess with some of their SSDs, it’s a different story.

If I’ll buy a new SSD it won’t be from WD then

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From THG – see link above.

The NAND flash downgrade may not affect the average consumer since it’s unlikely that the user will constantly fill the 12GB SLC cache.

cheers, Paul

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