if you buy Electronics on marketplaces like eBay or AliExpress you can easily
end up with a product that doesn't live up to the performance or quality that
you would expect but what if I told you that the same thing is happening right
now on reputable websites like new EG
and Microcenter and with trusted Brands
like Kingston PNY and adata that's right
all three of them have been accused of releasing new products then silently
downgrading them after the fact it's the perfect crime right you get a wave of
positive reviews from media and early Enthusiast customers right and for
everyone who comes later well they have no way of getting the original product
to compare so you can just handwave it away as your mileage may vary right
wrong in March of this year I put out a
bounty for a particular Drive the adata
xpg sx8200 pro offering to pay our
community members three times the MSRP
if anyone could ship me a unique variant
of this drive I mean how many could there be right two three eight wow
that's a lot and we've got five of them to answer three questions once and for
all are manufacturers bait in switching their customers why would they do that
and does it really matter anyway
on paper the xpg sx8200 pro is one of the top performing PCI Express gen 3 m.2
drives it's rated at up to 3500 megabytes per second reads and up to
3,000 megabytes per second rights and in third-party reviews it managed to meet
and sometimes even exceed those lofty claims whether sequential speeds are a
meaningful measure of SSD performance is a separate discussion but adata used it
as the standard to measure this product and they delivered on it except for one
small problem if you go to the store today and pull an sx8200 Pro Off the
Shelf you might not actually be getting one of these it ended up being a Reddit
user by the name of svart chimpan who blew the whistle on this they purchased
three adata sx8200 Pro 2 TB drives at
different points in time and and found that a brand new Drive purchased in 2021
was performing about as well as a 94%
full drive that had been in use for over a year big yikes as the kids say of
course just because something was posted on Reddit doesn't make it accurate and
in fact ad data pointed out that the user appeared to have connected one of
the ssds directly to CPU controlled PCIe
lanes while the other was running through the motherboard's PCH that
actually could account for The observed performance difference but I'm not fully
satisfied let's go through all of our different variants then and get them
naked starting with what a data sent to
the media all right there we go now
there are three main Hardware components that affect SSD performance starting
with the controller this acts as both the brain and Communications Hub of the
drive and better ones use smarter storage algorithms that have a profound
impact on both performance performance and endurance next we've got the nand
flash where all your data is actually stored fast high endurance nand means a
fast high endurance drive and then finally we've got our dram cache this
holds data temporarily so that it can be written in a way that okay this is
becoming a bit of a pattern here makes the drive faster and longer lasting and
this right here this is a good combination silicon motion SM 2262 EG
controller four times 256 gigs of imft
64 layer TLC n flash it's a total of 1 tbte and two packages of 512 megabytes
of n ddr3l hold on a second given that speed
and endurance are the only things really separating a premium SSD from a cheap
one it stands to reason that changing even one of these components has the
potential to turn this into an entirely different class of product so so what
did ad data change I'm so glad you
asked everything thanks to a tool developed
specifically for silicon motion controllers we were able to generate
this table with the full actual specs of
each of our five drives and to summarize what's happening here compared to our
original remember the one sent to the media not a single Drive had more than
one of these three components I just talked about that match
only this one purchased in July of 2019 even uses the same EG variant of the
controller with the other three using the slower G variant none of our Samples
used the same DDR3 as our original although I don't really expect that to
be a problem and all five of them used
not just different nand flash but
different Nan Flash from completely different vendors that's right out of
the top six Nan flash man manufacturers in the world we have five of them
represented here which doesn't matter as
long as they all meet the same bar for performance and endurance but the
question is do they unfortunately
without hundreds of samples we can't perform any kind of meaningful endurance
testing but we can validate performance and let's just say some discrepancies
were found right out of the gate the three drives using the slower G variant
of the controller failed to to meet the up to sequential read and WR speeds
advertised on the box while both of our en variant samples at least came very
close in Crystal disk Mark but let's see if these differences hold up in PC Mark
which is a benchmark that more closely simulates Real World Drive use now this
is interesting much like in the synthetic Benchmark the faster clocked
en variants managed higher Peak speeds for both reads and rights but their
overall performance was actually measurably lower and when we reran the
tests with all of the drives 3/4s filled with data the en variance took a more
noticeable performance hit between 7 1/2
to 9% that's compared to less than 1% on
the g- drives so in the case of the controller swap you're likely to end up
with better performance in the real world but that doesn't explain aata's
loot box approach to Nan flash procurement now this one is more likely
down to pricing and Market availability the SX 82 Pro launched right around the
time that 96 layer flash was making its way onto the market there's an R&D cost
associated with these transitions but adding more layers generally lowers the
cost per Gigabyte incentivizing this kind of development except that nand
pricing is subject to supply and demand pressure like any commodity so if Apple
let's say booked a huge order for 96 layer nand tightening the supply that
could drive up the price forcing smaller players like ad data to buy older 64
layer Tech or whatever's available all of which can be fine just like you'll
look fine in a stealth hoodie from LTT Store.com the thing is sourcing
components from two or more suppliers isn't a new strategy and sometimes it's
a necessary one Samsung uses both Snapdragon and exos S so's in their
Flagship phones and apple was sourcing modems from both Intel and Qualcomm
simultaneously at one point while they made the transition this this practice
can alleviate supply chain issues and it can force your vendors to stay cost
competitive if they know you can just buy it from someone else AMD famously
pulled a bait and switch with one of their products the ryzen 5600 a couple
years ago but in that case what they did was quietly moved it from 14 NM to 12 NM
giving their customers a slightly better version of what is fundamentally the
same product at a great price no harm no
foul it's just that the two rules to follow are that proper validation is
needed to ensure that both parts are indistinguishable to the end user and
failing that the changes must be disclosed a data doesn't appear to have
done either of those things in their statement to Tom's Hardware they said we
do guarantee that every sx8200 Pro will perform to spec within the regular
variations since the drives have been tested stringently but while that may be
technically correct anything between 0
and 3500 megabytes per second is technically up to 3500 megabytes per
second it also has the potential to be extremely misleading there was a similar
Scandal back in 2014 when Kingston and
PNY were called out for this same bait and switch tactic actually as we were
finishing writing this video news surfaced that PNY had allegedly quietly
reduced the accelerate CS 3030's Endurance by nearly 80% % on their 500
gig 1 tbyte and 2 tbte models yet there
was no revision number or announcement and it's still labeled on shelves as the
same drive that means that customers are left without the proper tools to make an
informed decision now these vendors might say who cares about a 10%
performance difference or it's not our fault it's down to the inconsistent
Supply and it's unmanageable to make a new skew every time there's a change but
my counter to that is a people pay a lot
of money for 10% more performance in some cases and B if you can't be ar to
test and label and get the specs right
for your own products maybe you need some oversight I mean this is why
organizations like Vasa exist prior to
vesa's display HDR certification program
HDR ready was casually thrown around
without any regard for the level of experience that product would actually
deliver now the current system ain't
perfect either I me display HDR 400 shouldn't even exist but at least that
label means that you can trust that product to meet a certain performance
standard camera storage labels like u3
and v90 on SD cards serve a similar purpose they give consumers a quick and
easy way to ensure that their media will handle the speeds their camera requires
now this hasn't really been an issue with SSD boot drives up until now
because the main competition for them has been from hard drives but as
genuinely faster ssds become a requirement for gamers who want to take
advantage of features like direct storage it would be really nice to see
someone hold these guys accountable finally for playing so fast and loose
with their product specs oh wait I guess that's
us SSD manufacturers stop it we see you all of
us you see that view counter down there everyone knows about this now and if you
guys don't cut it out we're going to be stuck telling everyone to just stick to
vendors like Samsung who are vertically integrated and don't randomly change
suppliers for literally every core
component of their product just like we tell everyone to
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