[Hardware] Not-So-Solid State: SSD Makers Swap Parts Without Telling Us

[Agent47]

 

 

Would you like to know exactly what the SSD you’re buying is capable of when you purchase it at retail? Unfortunately that’s becoming more difficult because some SSD manufacturers are now changing not only the NAND flash but also the SSD controller after the original products have been released and reviewed, but they aren’t disclosing that practice to customers. We’ve dug into the matter and tested three different versions of one SSD and found big differences in performance, but the SSDs all come with the same product name, number, and sticker on the drive.  

As our testing shows, the changes have a big impact on performance. Among other declines, one altered Adata SSD suffered from a 41% reduction in file copy performance and a 500 MBps decline in light workloads after the changes. In fact, one revision can’t even deliver on the rated 3,500/3,000 MBps specification, not to mention the rated 4K random performance, like the other revisions. 

In recent years we’ve seen many SSDs pass through our labs. But unfortunately, we can’t cover every hardware and firmware configuration on the market. Most SSD makers launch a new product and try to stick to that hardware component layout for the entirety of the SSD’s life cycle. And when hardware changes, or even in some instances just the firmware, the company will launch a new SKU. 

Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, and changing the NAND flash, which can have a big performance impact, has become a common but questionable practice in the SSD industry. Now that trend has evolved into a more worrisome pattern: Some smaller SSD manufacturers are now silently changing the SSD controller, too, which has even broader implications. 
Adata’s XPG SX8200 Pro sat atop our best SSDs list since the original review back in 2018. It was only upon the launch of the latest generation of SSDs that we retired the SSD from the list. But, just as we retired the top-listed SSD, we noticed that Adata had changed the controller, firmware and NAND on its XPG SX8200 Pro, without informing consumers, an action that opened the company up to controversy and customer backlash. Some customers have even returned their SSDs. 

The company admitted to us that it had switched from an SMI SM2262ENG to an SMI SM2262G controller, but said that new drives should offer similar performance and still meet its published specs. Those published specs are fairly broad as they only state that the drive uses an SMI controller (not which one) and that it can get up to 3,500 / 3,000 MBps sequential reads and writes with up to 390K / 380K IOPS.

We dug deeper and bought a new copy of the drive from a retail outlet, finding that it has different components than the original model. The company also sent us a new sample with yet another layout.