Month: August 2021

When's the last time you had pure fun at the movies? For a lot of us, it has probably been at least 1.5 years, given the whole global health pandemic that has been shutting down theaters and prompting distributors to withhold the types of movies that may deliver such joy (please, hold on Bond, please). Throughout 2020 and early 2021, the state of the industry sort of meant only extremes were released—prestige dramas vying for hardware and big budget blockbusters that cost so much they must push ASAP for ticket sales or a big streaming deal. Stumbling upon the unfettered pleasure of, say, something like Palm Springs became a rarity.

But if you can find It's a Summer Film!—a genre mashup from Japan that's centered on some samurai-obsessed high school girls—prepare for 90+ minutes of nonstop grinning. This film recently screened as part of Fantasia Fest, perhaps the world's finest genre film event. It's a festival that routinely features the type of work that catches viewers off guard but ends up landing among the year's best (see The Columnist, from 2020). Within another unusual film year in progress, It's a Summer Film! has already comfortably secured that very fate. In fact, it might be one of the most feel-good films we've come across in the last five years (up there with Bill & Ted 3, Coco, a documentary about Highlights for Children, and a high school zombie Christmas musical).

Filmed on (maybe) iPhone

Enlarge / You can't see the part number which distinguishes the newer, slower drive from the older, faster one on the box—you need to check the PN field in the top center of the label on the drive itself. (credit: Jim Salter)

Recently, major SSD vendors Crucial and Western Digital have both been caught swapping out TLC NAND in their consumer SSDs for cheaper but much lower-performance, lower-endurance QLC NAND. Samsung appears to be joining them in the part-swapping corner of shame today, thanks to Chinese Youtuber 潮玩客, who documented a new version of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus using an inferior drive controller.

Although the consumer-facing model number of the drives did not change—it was a 970 Evo Plus last year, and it's still a 970 Evo Plus now—the manufacturer part number did. Unfortunately, the manufacturer part number isn't visible on the box the SSD comes in—as far as we've been able to determine, it's only shown on a small label on the drive itself.

Falling off the write cliff

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  This CrystalDiskMark test makes the newer, inferior drive look faster than the original in most tests—but notice the very small 1GiB test size. This test isn't escaping the SLC write cache! [credit: 潮玩客 ]

We tested the 970 Evo Plus (alongside the 980, and the older 970 Pro) in March, clocking it at write speeds of 1,600+ MiB/sec on 1MiB workloads. Our benchmarking was done with he old version, part number MZVLB1T0HBLR. The newer version—part number MZVL21T0HBLU—is considerably slower. According to 潮玩客's test results, the newer version only manages 830MiB/sec—half the performance of the original.