Western Digital says that it did change NAND Flash memory on its NVME SSD

A long awaiting confirmation finally surfaced today. WD confirmed that they changed the NAND flash memory in the widely popular M.2 NVMe SSDs. Earlier it was reported that WD had changed the NAND in those SSD’s that caused a decrease in the writing speed of the drives.

However, WD also informed that although they didn’t inform their customer directly, they’ve already updated the WD Blue SN550 datasheet. But, WD has assured that from this point onwards, they will release a new model number if any update tends to change the already published specification.

The report was first initially published by a Chinese tech new site and was later confirmed by Tom’s Hardware. The changes in the NAND memory resulted in a performance decrease of approximately 50%. The updated units are almost as fast as the original ones. But once the 12 GB SLC cache gets exhausted, the performance drops.

WD didn’t reveal any information regarding the abrupt changes. But according to the ongoing situation in the Computer industry, the shortage of chips can be considered as the main reason behind this. As a result, many OEMs are forced to look for an alternative way.

According to a recent report by Wall Street, TSMC is going to increase the cost by 20% during late 2021 or early 2022.