Not gonna put a positive spin on this despite its acceptable outcome but Samsung has joined ADATA and Patriot in companies swapping parts without prior notice to their customers. In Samsung’s defense, the replacement does provide some performance improvement but also impacts another.
Computerbase reports that a Chinese Youtube channel shared their findings regarding Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus SSD and its current revision particularly the 1TB model. The original Samsung 970 EVO Plus contains a Phoenix controller with 3D TLC NAND while the newer model has an Elpis controller with 3D NAND.
The channel ran benchmarks which shows faster performance in some workloads but shows degraded performance once it exceeds its SLC cache size of 115GB – larger than the original 42GB SLC cache, which is good – but here is where the performance change is most prominent and is something that most oftentimes warrants the revision notice. Once the original Samsung 970 EVO Plus exceeds its SLC cache, it drops to around 1,500MB/s which is still admirable but the new revision, drops to a worse 800MB/s speed.
The video can be seen below:
As mentioned, brands like ADATA and Patriot have already been caught making revisions to their causing very different behaviors than their originally marketed parts. Sometimes, its only after being busted by the media that these companies change their marketing listings with the right numbers. In the case of Samsung, the behavior when exceeding the SLC cache is certainly a significant enough of a change to warrant a revision notice. Samsung has already historically made a V2 of a product in the form of the 850 EVO v2 so its weird to see Samsung not realizing to the same on the 970 EVO Plus.