It's an almost universal practice now for consumer SSDs. Intel's consumer SSD product line was the last one where I was pretty sure they weren't doing this.
Companies want to build product identities that can last for more than a year, but also want to be able to react to changes in the supply chain. Fixed BOM guarantees really aren't viable in this product segment, but you can often get such assurances in the enterprise, industrial or client OEM SSD markets.
Most of the time, swapping in a newer generation of NAND flash memory is a net improvement for a drive's performance and power efficiency, but when the newer generation increases the capacity per die there will almost always be a downside in some corner-case benchmark. Those swaps aren't worth worrying about, unless you're trying to abuse a consumer SSD for the kind of workloads enterprise SSDs are designed for.
Likewise, controller swaps are usually nothing to worry about—aside from some instances where performance downgrades stemming from NAND downgrades have been misattributed to a controller change, the most harmful examples in recent years have been when the amount of DRAM is reduced from the usual 1GB per 1TB ratio down to something more like 256MB per 1TB. The consequences of such a change are easy to demonstrate with synthetic benchmarks, but almost impossible to measure let alone notice for real-world usage patterns. Other times, a controller "downgrade" simply swaps in a cheaper controller that is still more than fast enough for the NAND to be the bottleneck.
It would be nice if we could universally get more detailed spec sheets and a guarantee of a new consumer-visible model number when the major components change, but the consumer SSD market has proven too price-sensitive and the technology and supply chain too dynamic for that to be a competitive business strategy. For the most part, you do get what you pay for, except that a few of the top brands also command an undeserved price premium.
Not really true. ADATA pretty much demonstrated that you could get away with swapping the controller at least 3 times and slowly shaving off performance so that people won't notice until they actually did. And the performance was down by 25%-40% in the third swap. This sets a precedent and sooner or later other manufacturers will follow.
My pet peeve with the whole debacle is that words and promises no longer matter especially when marketing ends up using words like "upto."
Give me a minimum, maximum and specs written in stone and I won't care if you change out components. As it is now, the entire thing has become a game of whack-a-mole, SSD reviews are loosing their relevance and given enough time (+current trajectory) we could easily end up in SSD market which is more like fast fashion than anything else.
> Companies want to build product identities that can last for more than a year, but also want to be able to react to changes in the supply chain.
A fixed product identity for something that materially changes would best be described as a form of fraud, and it is unfortunate that sort of deception is business as usual in too many places.
> A fixed product identity for something that materially changes
For the most part, these changes are not "material" in the sense of having a significant impact on the overall performance of the product or its suitability for the intended use cases.
It's mostly the tech enthusiast audience that cares about these changes. That audience is highly susceptible to fixating on "objective" criteria or benchmarks that aren't actually relevant to any of their real-world usage. If you exclude the differences that only show up in synthetic benchmarks specifically crafted to reveal subtle differences in SSD performance, the scope of this issue and the potential instances of fraud are vastly smaller.
Companies want to build product identities that can last for more than a year, but also want to be able to react to changes in the supply chain. Fixed BOM guarantees really aren't viable in this product segment, but you can often get such assurances in the enterprise, industrial or client OEM SSD markets.
Most of the time, swapping in a newer generation of NAND flash memory is a net improvement for a drive's performance and power efficiency, but when the newer generation increases the capacity per die there will almost always be a downside in some corner-case benchmark. Those swaps aren't worth worrying about, unless you're trying to abuse a consumer SSD for the kind of workloads enterprise SSDs are designed for.
Likewise, controller swaps are usually nothing to worry about—aside from some instances where performance downgrades stemming from NAND downgrades have been misattributed to a controller change, the most harmful examples in recent years have been when the amount of DRAM is reduced from the usual 1GB per 1TB ratio down to something more like 256MB per 1TB. The consequences of such a change are easy to demonstrate with synthetic benchmarks, but almost impossible to measure let alone notice for real-world usage patterns. Other times, a controller "downgrade" simply swaps in a cheaper controller that is still more than fast enough for the NAND to be the bottleneck.
It would be nice if we could universally get more detailed spec sheets and a guarantee of a new consumer-visible model number when the major components change, but the consumer SSD market has proven too price-sensitive and the technology and supply chain too dynamic for that to be a competitive business strategy. For the most part, you do get what you pay for, except that a few of the top brands also command an undeserved price premium.