- If you buy electronics on marketplaces like eBay
or Ali Express, 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 Newegg and Micro Center,
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 hand wave 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.
Our manufacturers, bait and switching their customers,
why would they do that?
(low-pitched music)
(upbeat electrifying music)
On paper, the XPG SX8200 Pro is one
of the top performing PCI express GEN3M.2 drives.
It's rated at up to 3500 megabytes per second reads
and up to 3000 megabytes per second writes.
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 Svarchimpans,
who blew the whistle on this.
They purchased three 88 SX8200 Pro two terabyte drives
at different points in time
and found that a brand new drive purchased in 2021
was performing a boat 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 on Reddit,
doesn't make it accurate.
And in fact, Adata 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 motherboards 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 Adata sent to the media.
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 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 ENG controller,
4x256 gigs of IMFT 64 layer TLC NAND flash.
It's a total of one terabyte,
and two packages of 512 megabytes of Nanya 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, what did Adata 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 matches.
Only this one purchased in July of 2019,
even uses the same ENG 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 use not just different NAND flash,
but different NAND flash from completely different vendors.
That's right.
Out of the top six NAND flash 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 meet the up two
sequential read and write speeds advertised on the box
while both of our EN variant samples
at least came very close in CrystalDiskMark.
But let's see if these differences hold up in PCMark,
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 writes,
but their overall performance was actually measurably lower.
And when we rerun the tests with all of the drives,
three quarters filled with data,
the EN variants took a more noticeable performance hit
between seven and a half 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 88
as loot box approach to NAND 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 RND 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 Adata to buy older 64 layer tech
or whatever's available, all of which can be fine,
just like you'll look fine in that stealth hoodie
from lltstore.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 Exynoses on flagship phones
and Apple was sourcing modems
from both Intel and Qualcomm simultaneously
at one point while they made the transition.
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 5 1600 a couple of years ago.
But in that case, what they did was quietly moved it
from 14 nanometer to 12 nanometers,
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.
Adata 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 zero 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 the same bait and switch tactic.
Actually, as we were finishing writing this video,
new surface that PNY had allegedly quietly
reduced the accelerate CS3030's endurance
by nearly 80% on their 500 gig one terabyte
and two terabyte 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 skill 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 arsed 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 Vesa 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 mean, 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 V 90 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 stick
to buying technology and computer hardware at Micro Center
Micro Center has 25 locations across the United States
and you can check out Micro Center's custom PC builder
to spec out the best PC for your budget.
They'll help you ensure all your parts are compatible,
find stock available at your nearest micro center location,
and once you add it to your cart,
you can arrange same day in store pickup.
For a fee you can check the box marked same day pro assembly
and Micro Center's expert technicians
will assemble your PC for you.
If you want help deciding what parts
to put in your new custom gaming PC,
join the online Micro Center community.
It's a great place to discuss tech with other enthusiasts.
So don't wait, check out the link in the video description
to learn more about Micro Center
and get a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones,
valid in store only, no purchase necessary.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out the "Linus was right" video.
It's not what it sounds like.
It's the other line is,
we're talking about ECC memory offer.
(man laughing)