[wtallis]

On the SSD side of the storage market, I know it's becoming more common over the past ~2 years for manufacturers to change drive internals without changing the model name/number (for consumer drives only). In the past year, I've had one brand proactively bring it up as part of a product announcement presentation and two other brands have mentioned it in the course of an extended conversation about their entire product line. For the one company that mentioned the hardware update in their press release, I asked if they could get me a review sample of the new revision, but the drive that arrived a few weeks later was the old version.

Most of the updates like this in the SSD market are actually pretty harmless—switching a SATA drive from 64L to 96L TLC generally isn't going to change the performance or power characteristics enough to care about, and is more likely to be beneficial than harmful. But when they start introducing QLC NAND into a product line that originally was TLC-only, that's a problem.