from Hacker News

Samsung declares different TBW for same SSD model on different markets

by the4anoni on 7/14/24, 7:09 AM with 22 comments

• by jdietrich on 7/14/24, 10:42 AM

  Par for the course in the consumer SSD market. Manufacturers often change the controller or flash chips without changing the model number.

  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-and-other-ssd-makers...

  Samsung have a long history of releasing the same phone with a different SoC in different regions - Snapdragon in the highest-value markets, but slower and less efficient Exynos everywhere else.

  https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-exynos-versus-snapd...

• by jeroenhd on 7/14/24, 10:34 AM

  Looking into this further, I came across this website: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-... If you expand ("view more") the spec page, you get this list of guarantees:

      MZ-V9P1T0BW (1TB)
      5-year or 600 TBW limited warranty
  
      MZ-V9P2T0BW (2TB)
      5-year or 1200 TBW limited warranty
  
      MZ-V9P4T0BW (4TB)
      5-year or 2400 TBW limited warranty
  
  

  This could just be a localisation issue. Different SKUs have different TBW guarantees, and whoever copy/pasted the number may just have copied over the wrong localisation file. If they started translating the 2TB version and then copied that translation over to the 1TB and 4TB versions, it'd explain why the numbers are different.

  It would also explain why the Dutch website lists the 2400TBW number in English.

• by TeMPOraL on 7/14/24, 9:07 AM

  I imagine it's because Poland, and EU in general, is serious about consumer protection. When they set the TBW to 2400TB, there's X% of drives that will fail under that, requiring warranty service. That X% might be OK in the US, but too expensive for them in Poland, so they slice the TBW in half, reducing failure-within-warranty % to a small fraction of X (it's non-linear), and call it a day.

  (For products aimed at general consumer market, approximately no one will look at this parameter at the time of purchase - but they might when the drive fails and they wonder whether they're entitled to a replacement.)

• by mkl on 7/14/24, 10:13 AM

  TBW = Terabytes Written (how much data writing the drive can withstand over its lifetime).

• by Rinzler89 on 7/14/24, 8:39 AM

  >Samsung claims this is not an error on their site

  That doesn't necessarily make it true. There's no guarantee that the clueless underpaid rep whoever claimed that from Samsung's side actually knew what they were talking about or have the contacts of Samsung Semi engineers to ask for correct technical specs or would bother with it even if he could #notmyjob.

  It could very well be a typo or copy/paste error that the rep can't verify so they double down on it being correct (our company doesn't make mistakes policy) with the excuse of different markets since product segmentation is a real thing even if it might not apply here.

• by HayBale on 7/14/24, 9:57 AM

  Its normal double standards. The same happens with non west Europe food items and detergents that are sold in the central or eastern Europe. The sold on non western market have more diluted product or contain more sugar or artificial ingredients.

• by dist-epoch on 7/14/24, 10:13 AM

  Engineering and marketing are two separate things.

  You can deduce the TBW from SMART data. That would be an interesting comparison between the products sold in the two countries.

• by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 7/14/24, 7:43 AM

  What about the prices? Is Polish one cheaper?

• by saddist0 on 7/14/24, 8:31 AM

  It is same for mobile specifications as well lately, where some countries have different chipset (at same prices!).