Western Digital guts WD SN550 Blue

Stefan Mileschin · 30th August 2021, 13:39

Older drives are better

Chinese tech site Expreview claims that the WD SN550 Blue -- which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market -- has undergone a NAND lobotomy.

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 to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This has lead to criticism that Western Digital has performed a bait and switch. It produced a brilliant SSDs, got good reviews and then replaced it with one with bad gubbins.

While there's nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there's nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts.

What appears to have got many peoples' goat is that reviewers are the customers and they are not inclined to shut up about it.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...-wd-sn550-blue

30th August 2021, 13:39	#1
Stefan Mileschin [M] Reviewer Join Date: May 2010 Location: Romania Posts: 153,575	Western Digital guts WD SN550 Blue Older drives are better Chinese tech site Expreview claims that the WD SN550 Blue -- which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market -- has undergone a NAND lobotomy. 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 to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive. This has lead to criticism that Western Digital has performed a bait and switch. It produced a brilliant SSDs, got good reviews and then replaced it with one with bad gubbins. While there's nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there's nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts. What appears to have got many peoples' goat is that reviewers are the customers and they are not inclined to shut up about it. https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...-wd-sn550-blue

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