Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsSamsung is Getting Shady
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2021
Samsung is getting shady and I will be looking for new company with next laptop purchase. The 2TB version of this drive was the best deal on Black Friday of 2021 for $199. This is the only reason I bought it. Kudos to Amazon for delivering weeks earlier than stated date due to backorder. Ordered from Amazon, not a third-party vendor. Observations:
1. Drive has 1.863TB usable. This is 6.85% less than rated capacity of 2TB. This is a substantial difference. I understand that base-2 computations will usually create a discrepancy, but 137GB less than rated capacity is unacceptable. Call it a 1.86GB drive or get closer to actual stated capacity. Samsung needs to STOP LYING about its drive capacities.
2. Samsung continues practice of being shady about product specs. Historically there was SLC (single-level cell), MLC (double), TLC (triple), QLC (quadruple), etc., in terms of type of memory in the SSD. The M in MLC stands for multiple, which could in theory mean any number greater than 1, but in practice always meant 2 or double throughout the industry. The short, oversimplified version is that the larger the "LC", the faster the drive, but the less durable and ultimately reliable in terms of write capacity. If you store more data in each cell, then you can read data more quickly because you will often have to access fewer cells to retrieve it. The flip side is you are accessing each cell more frequently, so they wear down quicker. I prefer reliability of MLC, and it is irritating to have Samsung engage in shady misrepresentation by referring to this TLC drive and others as "3-bit MLC." Yes, in theory, 16-bit MLC is still "multi" but this is not the common meaning. Samsung needs to reign in its shady marketing staff and STOP LYING.
3. I have a 970 Pro 1TB with MLC in Dell Precision 7550 workstation laptop as boot drive and storage of critical data files. I have (2) 970 Evo Plus 2TB in same laptop as data drives and backups. The 970Pro is warrantied for 1200TBW (terabytes written) with 1TB capacity. The 970EvoPlus drives are warrantied for 1200TBW, but have double the capacity of the 970Pro, meaning they are warrantied for half the effective use. Different people may favor different tradeoffs in this regard, one is not simplistically better, but Samsung now doesn't list the TBW for many of its newer drives so buyers don't see this effective "cost" of larger drive size and the use of TLC. Samsung is also much less transparent about certain other specs. I go to 970Pro product page on Samsung website, EVERY spec is listed, but not for later and cheaper drives like Evo. This is clearly intended to hide the ultimate “cost” of cheaper TLC memory from consumers. Samsung should STOP LYING.
4. Like other TLC drives, this one uses caching to attain write speeds of MLC, but then falls off a cliff when the admittedly large cache is exhausted, during long, sustained reads or writes. This may or may not matter to users depending on how much contiguous writing they do.
6. The Samsung migrate software won’t recognize drives in RAID BIOS setting (as opposed to AHCI). It won’t recognize drives in many enclosures. If it can’t recognize a Samsung drive, which it often can’t, it won’t clone system drive to new drive, meaning you are stuck looking for a workaround. Macrium Reflect is good free option, but the supposed advantage of Samsung migration and magician software is eroding because these programs often do not work. Similarly, magician won’t play nice with other drives, meaning you need two utilities or more and can’t easily compare all drives. It won’t recognize drives in many RAID configs. The new version of magician adds tons of non-essential features that clutter up the interface and make it MUCH less user-friendly and useful. An idiotized help consumes much of right of software interface and you can’t get rid of it. You can’t easily see performance of multiple drives simultaneously. Etc.
7. I installed drives in my Precision mid-December, within 48 hours of receiving. I registered warranty on Samsung site the same day. You can’t cut and paste serial numbers or exact model numbers or even just click a button in magician and auto register. Upon registering, I find that my warranty period began 15-45 days before I received the drive. Drives are warrantied 60 months or to TBW capacity, in practice for most users the time period will expire before the TBW; I lost 1.5 months of warranty or 2.5% of warranty by it being set to a time before I even had the drive in my possession.
8. I understood #1-#7 above BEFORE buying drives, but that doesn’t make these issues any less annoying. Lies about drive capacity. Shadiness in not revealing key specifications and performance parameters. Increasingly ineffective software that bloats with unneeded features but fails to nail the critical ones. Shadiness in warranties. Etc. It all adds up.
9. The truth is that for most real-world applications for most users, any of the major brands perform about the same, in terms of PCIe Gen3 M2 NVME drives. The performance of this drive is solid, but not mind blowing. I am happy with it given the price, and just the general increase in speed and capacity that technological innovation provides. I am nonetheless moving away from Samsung, just on principle, unless they are the cheapest. I am no longer willing to pay a premium for a Samsung name because the old Samsung integrity and dominant performance is gone. If another reputable brand is available at the same price, my next drive will not be a Samsung. Their endless lies have just gotten to be too much.
