Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs
Enlarge / You can't see the part number which distinguishes the newer, slower drive from the older, faster one on the box-you need to check the PN field in the top center of the label on the drive itself. (credit: Jim Salter)
Recently, major SSD vendors Crucial and Western Digital have both been caught swapping out TLC NAND in their consumer SSDs for cheaper but much lower-performance, lower-endurance QLC NAND. Samsung appears to be joining them in the part-swapping corner of shame today, thanks to Chinese Youtuber , who documented a new version of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus using an inferior drive controller.
Although the consumer-facing model number of the drives did not change-it was a 970 Evo Plus last year, and it's still a 970 Evo Plus now-the manufacturer part number did. Unfortunately, the manufacturer part number isn't visible on the box the SSD comes in-as far as we've been able to determine, it's only shown on a small label on the drive itself.
Falling off the write cliff
This CrystalDiskMark test makes the newer, inferior drive look faster than the original in most tests-but notice the very small 1GiB test size. This test isn't escaping the SLC write cache! [credit: ]
We tested the 970 Evo Plus (alongside the 980, and the older 970 Pro) in March, clocking it at write speeds of 1,600+ MiB/sec on 1MiB workloads. Our benchmarking was done with he old version, part number MZVLB1T0HBLR. The newer version-part number MZVL21T0HBLU-is considerably slower. According to 's test results, the newer version only manages 830MiB/sec-half the performance of the original.
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