From what I understand, Flash manufacturing and management during operation are black arts at this point and nobody wants to give the smallest clue for anything related to Flash management and specifications.
For example, Crucial (Micron) doesn't give any TBW for their external SSDs, giving indications that they're using mixed-binning as long as the speed specs are satisfied. Same for lower level Kingston (NV series) SSDs. At least they openly say that the drives can wildly differ from batch to batch (and oh boy, they do).
As the industry is pinched by customers for more capacity, QLC becomes the norm, TBW numbers are continuously hidden, and you're only left with the internal endurance counters, if you can access them.
Controllers are in the same boat. Wear leveling, write amplification, flash monitoring are all left to whims of the controller designers, resulting in strange situations.
Off-shift/dark production is another problem, but it's not new by any means. BunnyStudios has a great write up which has been linked a couple of times.
The datasheets for the early flash memories (SLC) were easily available and loudly proclaimed 100K or even 1M cycles of endurance and 10-20 years of retention. Now they're very difficult to obtain and are rated for only a few hundred cycles and a few months of retention. No wonder they're secretive about it.
True. I still remember Corsair’s words about original Flash Voyager GT 16GB:
“We had to change our flash controller, but the performance is the same. Same 100K write SLC flash, same speed, same endurance, same Flash Voyager” (paraphrase mine).
I still have that drive and it has a small file write performance which can rival a low level SSD despite being a USB 2.0 drive.
For example, Crucial (Micron) doesn't give any TBW for their external SSDs, giving indications that they're using mixed-binning as long as the speed specs are satisfied. Same for lower level Kingston (NV series) SSDs. At least they openly say that the drives can wildly differ from batch to batch (and oh boy, they do).
As the industry is pinched by customers for more capacity, QLC becomes the norm, TBW numbers are continuously hidden, and you're only left with the internal endurance counters, if you can access them.
Controllers are in the same boat. Wear leveling, write amplification, flash monitoring are all left to whims of the controller designers, resulting in strange situations.
Off-shift/dark production is another problem, but it's not new by any means. BunnyStudios has a great write up which has been linked a couple of times.