 |
|
| leading the way to the new
storage frontier |
..... | |
|
| |
| .. |
WARNING! - CONSUMER SSD
contents liable to
change without notice |
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - June 13, 2014
It seems that the risk of preplanned
component substitutions by the original branded SSD maker (rather than merely
the supply chain risk of counterfeits by persons unknown) is another uncertainty
which readers in the consumer SSD market may now have to contend with.
The
article below was a popular story in
SSD news in
June 2014. | | |
| .. |
6 years ago when I
published the article -
Can you trust flash SSD
specifications & benchmarks? - which began with this sentence - "One
of the things I've noticed is that the published specs of flash SSDs change a
lot - from the time products are first announced, then when they're being
sampled, and later again when they are in volume production" - I was
alluding to the unintended negative performance consequences of firmware
upgrades rather than the deliberate substitution of an entirely different
SSD controller
introduced in an SSD product family soon after its launch.
But it
seems that the risk of deliberate component substitutions by the original
branded SSD maker (rather than merely the supply chain risk of counterfeits
by persons unknown) is another uncertainty which readers in the
consumer SSD market
may now have to contend with - according to a new article -
SSD
shadiness - vendors caught switching to cheaper components after good reviews
written by Joel
Hruska in an article for ExtremeTech.
After
naming and shaming specific SSD offenders with various accused offences -
Joel goes on to warn other vendors who might be thinking of doing something
similar - "If reviewers can't trust that the performance they see is
the performance end-users will receive, they'll never recommend your components."
...read
the article
Editor's comments:- A reader in the
consumer market contacted me recently because he thought I didn't give enough
warnings about the potentially unreliability of consumer SSDs.
I
was shocked by that view and sent him a deluge of links to cautionary
articles - including those below - in which the extracts shown here are the
original unedited quotes from each article.
- "SSDs aimed at the consumer market are designed to deliver basic
functionality at the lowest price. That means the designers (originally due to
ignorance – but nowadays with foreknowledge) have to decide what shortcuts
they can take in the production process and what design factors they can leave
out to reduce the price - compared to a reliable industrial / military /
enterprise grade SSD." -
Why can consumers expect
to see more flaky flash SSDs?
- "How good are consumer SSDs? You won't find anyone more enthusiastic
about solid state storage than me. But - here's an important sanity check. Even
the very best consumer SSDs available today are vastly inferior in performance
and reliability to the best SSDs in the enterprise and industrial markets."
- the consumer SSDs
guide
- "In the first 5 years of its history (2006-2010) the notebook SSD
market was a disappointment to SSD evangelists like me - because integration
with PCs was so bad, and most of the SSDs were too slow or had too little
capacity to be useful..." -
overview of the
notebook SSD market
And there are more - but I won't list them all
here.
The danger for newcomers to many SSD market is they read 1 or
2 articles about
endurance
and think that's all there is to know about SSDs.
If the SSD world
was as simple as that I would have abandoned this topic 10 years ago instead of
writing all those other
SSD
articles.
The issues of visible and invisible BOM changes in
embedded SSDs from the perspective of buyers in the
industrial and
military markets is
discussed in - There's no
such thing as a standard industrial SSD | |
| . |
|
| |
|
|
| .. |
|
|
.. |
|
|
|
. |
|
and here below is another example of a consumer
SSD warning story - from the
SSD news
archive |
|
. |
|
| SSD Review exposes how
rebranded memory can adulterate consumer SSDs |
Editor:- February 18, 2013 - the SSD Review recently published
an
in-depth article which shows how the memory chips in
consumer SSDs -
which appear to come from one source - may actually have come from somewhere
else.
The article - by Les Tokar, Editor-in-Chief
of the SSD Review - reads at times
like a gripping detective story - and looks into the murky topic of remarking
and rebranding flash chips - which can lead to adulteration and quality
problems in the memory supply chain - all in pursuit of getting the lowest
manufacturing cost.
These problems and risks have been well known in expert SSD circles
but Les Tokar's new exposé brings this shadow world into vivid focus.
...read
the article | | |
|
.
. |
|
| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
|
| | |
|
. |
|
| |
