Buyer Beware: Crucial Swaps P2 SSD’s TLC NAND for Slower Chips

Crucial has come under fire after a retest of its well-reviewed P2 SSD demonstrated that the company has swapped from its launch design to a much inferior product. This is not the first time SSD manufacturers have been caught bait-and-switching customers in this fashion and it’s deeply frustrating to see companies willing to subvert their own review process.

The scheme goes like this: Sample an SSD out to reviewers and spec it reasonably well. Once all the reviews are in, swap out the components for inferior products that are not as power-efficient and/or do not offer the same performance. That’s what Tom’s Hardware found when it investigated Crucial’s P2 NVMe M.2 SSD after reviewing the initial part shipped by Crucial.

Crucial has swapped the TLC NAND it originally shipped with QLC NAND — and not terribly good QLC NAND, at that. The new version of the P2 has two fewer NAND chip packages than the original, and significantly fewer total dies. This reduces the total potential bandwidth the SSD controller can achieve and further harms the performance of the 500GB drive. Average power consumption on the QLC drive is lower, at 1.49W, but total power efficiency is actually worse because the savings do not make up for the dramatically slower performance. If full drive performance on the P2 was already bad, it’s downright abysmal on the P2 with QLC NAND:

The company claims this is acceptable because it published lower specifications for the original TLC drives than what they were capable of reaching. But multiple reviews from websites across the internet had found and reported that the drives were faster than advertised. Also, the claims Crucial made regarding how the QLC-equipped P2 will meet or exceed previously claimed performance focus entirely on the SLC cache, not the actual performance of the underlying NAND.

Crucial’s claim that it published the expected performance figures for QLC NAND rather than TLC NAND, and that therefore this is fine, do not pass the sniff test. Readers looking for reviews of the P2 will find coverage claiming the drive outperforms its expected performance and therefore believe it represents a better deal than it does.

From our perspective, selling products like this is worse than just shipping low-end hardware. Honest low-end hardware can be fairly evaluated and priced. Dishonest moves like this cannot be fairly evaluated because its reviews were based on a functionally different product. Any customer who bothers to benchmark their own drive will soon discover that they’ve been sold garbage relative to what they thought they were paying for.

If Intel or AMD shipped one CPU to reviewers and then launched an identically named consumer variant that clocked 500MHz lower and offered half as much cache, with no way to differentiate between the two, there’d be a tremendous outcry from end-users who rightfully felt they’d been scammed. This is no different. A company that ships a product for public review is promising that those figures will be representative and trustworthy. Anything less obviates the point. No reviewer wants to waste time writing a launch review of a product sample that doesn’t reflect what you’ll buy in stores. No potential buyer wants to waste time reading reviews of a product that doesn’t represent the performance of hardware they wish to buy.

What THG’s retest shows, in aggregate, is a QLC drive with performance that’s superficially similar to the TLC drive Crucial initially shipped. Under any kind of stress, however, the drive’s performance collapses. It performs markedly worse than other drives in its class. THG’s testing shows it reads files at half the speed of its TLC variant and copies them at roughly 1/4 the speed. This is not simply a price optimization. Selling someone an identically named product that performs at 25-50 percent of its performance rate when evaluated in third-party neutral publications ought to be considered fraud.

This is the kind of behavior one expects from resellers, not a company that manufacturers its own NAND and DRAM. Adata has engaged in this practice and Kingston has as well. Crucial built its entire brand on the idea that while it might not make the absolute fastest DRAM, it built solid, dependable products that people could rely upon. Deliberately slapping the wrong performance specifications on the better version of an SSD so you can retroactively claim to have been honest with customers once your scheme is discovered is not acceptable. One might even say that product consistency is crucial to maintaining customer trust. There is no faster way to destroy that trust than to ship one product revision to reviewers and a second, vastly inferior version to customers. Crucial’s justification — that it printed the inferior product performance on the box — only confirms that the scheme was prepped well before the product launched.

Micron, which markets the Crucial brand to consumers, reported revenue of $7.42B in its last quarter, up from $5.4B a year ago. The company’s gross margin rose from 33 percent to 42 percent. Its operating income rose from $981 billion in Q3 2020 of its fiscal quarter to $1.799 billion in fiscal quarter Q3 2021. To celebrate this tremendous growth, Micron announced a quarterly cash dividend, claiming: “Initiating a common stock dividend reflects our confidence in Micron’s future and our commitment to creating compelling value for shareholders.”

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