Faced with a years-long global chip shortage, SSD manufacturers have resorted to swapping components and parts more often. In some cases, these changes in the innards are being done silently and could lead to reduction in performance of the SSDs.
As spotted by Chinese site Expreview, Western Digital has revised its WD Blue SN550, a budget-friendly SSD that’s generally well-received as it could perform relatively faster than other SSDs with the same price. With the revised model, however, Expreview claims that WD’s offering now has a write speed of 390 MB/s, or up to 50 percent slower than the original model.
A Chinese YouTuber, meanwhile, is claiming Samsung has also revised one of its SSDs for the worse. He claims that a new version of the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB has a write speed of 800 MB/s, whereas an older version could reach 1500 MB/s.
Other SSD vendors, such as Adata and Crucial, have been caught in the act of component swapping as well.
To consumers eyeing for SSD with fast read-write speeds, always check the spec sheet, model number, and packaging so you don’t get ripped off with an inferior model. Critic reviews and user reports can help too.
Via: Arstechnica