[HN Gopher] Silent changes to Western Digital's budget SSD may l...
___________________________________________________________________
Silent changes to Western Digital's budget SSD may lower speeds by
up to 50%
Author : elsewhen
Score : 337 points
Date : 2021-08-26 12:27 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| aurizon wrote:
| Wanna buy a one legged duck? People who will want this are low
| end system builders who can add the "Has an SSD" who market to
| people have no idea how fast a 2 legged duck can run....
| bserge wrote:
| *fly. So it makes no difference until the duck lands :D
| aurizon wrote:
| Maybe the duck has trouble taking off too? In effect they
| sell a crippled product for less $$ to the cheap system
| builders who market on price to people impressed by SSD, who
| know no better
| zucker42 wrote:
| This was a problem with the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro, which LTT
| covered in this video[1].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/K07sEM6y4Uc
| theropost wrote:
| I think I'm done with WD from now on. The whole WD MyBooklive
| remote factory result fiasco annoyed me as well - for those
| impacted they offered a 40% discount on one of their new
| MyBookLive devices, as long as you send the old drive back
| (shipping paid by user).
| Const-me wrote:
| We only have 4 manufacturers of SSD drives who also making their
| own chips: Intel, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Here's the
| table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solid-
| state_drive_manu...
|
| I tend to buy Samsung and Intel, both working well in my devices.
| scns wrote:
| Sadly my goto Crucial started doing it too, but they paired it
| with a huge price drop. Was the P2 NVME IIRC. ~70EUR for 1TB.
| kogepathic wrote:
| I thought Western Digital had vertically integrated their SSDs
| after the purchase of SanDisk?
|
| According to that Wikipedia list, Western Digital _does_
| manufacture their own flash, through a joint venture with
| Kioxia.
| andruby wrote:
| Also, Western Digital is looking at completely buying that
| Kioxia
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/western-digital-
| advanced-...
| justinclift wrote:
| > I tend to buy Samsung and Intel, both working well in my
| devices.
|
| It's a generalisation, but be careful of using new Samsung
| consumer SATA drives (860, 870) if you're using Linux.
|
| The Linux kernel has workarounds in place for the older ones
| (840, 850 series). But the workarounds for the newer models are
| only starting to be looked at this week:
|
| https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203475
|
| Without those workarounds (eg disabling NCQ trim), there are
| data loss problems.
| wtallis wrote:
| > disabling NCQ trim
|
| Fixed support for queued trim was part of the marketing
| claims for the 860 series. Whatever's going on with the 860
| and newer drives requires deeper investigation, because
| there's plenty of reason to believe that simply applying the
| old workaround is not accurately targeting the real problem.
| justinclift wrote:
| The old workaround was to turn off support for NCQ (queued)
| trim, instead just using standard trim.
|
| It doesn't seem to have any real downsides. :)
| wtallis wrote:
| > It doesn't seem to have any real downsides
|
| That depends greatly on what your software's policy for
| issuing Trim commands is. Partly because of the dearth of
| drives properly supporting queued trim, it is common for
| Linux distro to only run trim commands via cron job,
| rather than issuing them in real time during a workload.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Thanks, I had no idea about this. I've been using Samsung
| drives in all of my machines and servers and I run Linux
| exclusively. With a mixture of 850, 860 and 870's I must be
| at least partially affected.
| Const-me wrote:
| Thanks for the warning. Fortunately, I'm unaffected because
| running Windows.
|
| I'm running Linux on top in WSL1 and VMWare.
|
| Also running Linux on ARM devices which have neither SATA nor
| PCIx. When I need fast disks in them to compile my C++ code,
| I simply use a network-mounted drive to build, gigabit LAN is
| good.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Are 860s new? They are what's in my system and while I don't
| remember when I upgraded it was definitely pre-COVID...
|
| [edit]
|
| smart says they have 631 days of power-on time, so maybe
| 2019?
|
| [edit]
|
| I seem to remember having issues a while back but I haven't
| seen any since I upgraded my firmware to RVT04B6Q
| justinclift wrote:
| k, I probably should have said "newer" (than 850 model)
| rather than "new". The 870 model though, is pretty new. :)
| scns wrote:
| Just read that Samsung changed the BOM on 970 evo plus.
| Switched to the controller of the 980 pro. Test reults are
| mixed. 4K QD1 is up ~50->82MB/s, serial writes after exhausting
| SLC cache (115GB) are nearly halved 1500->800MB/s.
| wtallis wrote:
| That's not what happens when you switch to a newer, faster
| controller. Those performance changes are what happens when
| you switch to newer NAND flash that's manufactured with twice
| the per-die capacity, so you have half as many dies for a
| given drive capacity. (Assuming the newer NAND isn't split
| into twice as many planes per die to compensate.)
|
| Edit: Looking into this further, TechPowerUp, Computerbase
| and others have mistaken K90UGY8J5B for K9DUGY8J5B. It's an
| easy mistake to make, and I've done exactly this before. But
| it completely explains the performance difference. The D that
| changed to a 0 signifies a switch from 16 dies per package
| down to 8 dies per package. The digits signifying the
| capacity of the package have stayed the same. The "B" at the
| end signifying the generation has also stayed the same, but
| Samsung didn't introduce 512Gbit TLC dies until a generation
| after they introduced 256Gbit TLC dies, so on the smaller
| dies the "B" means 92L and on the larger dies the "B" means
| 128L.
| reviews-chat wrote:
| people trust reviews, that's why
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Note that it's not just SSDs that can have completely different
| components on the same part. I've seen many USB wifi dongles with
| the same model number use completely different wifi chips
| internally.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Quick summary: The drive is 1TB with a 12 GB SLC cache that's
| capable of 2160 MBps write speeds. When you write more than 12GB
| in a short time to the drive you can run out of this cache and
| speeds drop to 390 MBps. The dive was previously tested as
| capable of 610 MBps in this scenario. (Read speeds are fast in
| every scenario.)
| post_break wrote:
| Ship the top tier hardware NVME drives to reviewers, wait a few
| months then start swapping out slower memory chips, controllers,
| go through multiple revisions while keeping the same name so when
| gamers look for reviews they see blinding speeds only to be
| duped. It's incredible what drive manufacturers are getting away
| with.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >It's incredible what drive manufacturers are getting away
| with.
|
| I think it's more incredible that we continue to elect
| governments that let them get away with it.
| vizzier wrote:
| Linus Tech Tips recently did a video on this practice[1].
| Almost every major component was changed but still sold as the
| same drive. In summary, performance was different though not
| necessarily in a major negative way. In this case it was an
| ADATA NVME drive.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K07sEM6y4Uc
| HauntingPin wrote:
| I've also seen this happen with laptops. They'll have a decent
| Samsung NVMe SSD when reviewers get their hands on the devices,
| but then after release, they switch it out for a cheaper one
| that performs much worse, particularly in longer workloads.
| bitL wrote:
| I bought a 1TB WD Blue M.2 SSD like the one on the picture and my
| computer has issues booting from it when all USB devices are
| plugged in (x299/10980XE). It looks like more people have issues
| booting from it as well, based on the feedback I saw on the
| seller site. How can one botch SSD that way?
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| We ought to have the equivalent of crowdsourced semantic
| versioning and CVEs for products and reviews. As a consumer, I
| should be able to know _easily_ if any breaking changes have
| happened that could render a specific set of reviews or
| benchmarks obsolete, and just as easily if a specific issue is
| resolved in future revisions.
|
| Too often I've e.g. bought an Amazon product I've bought before,
| only to receive Revision 2 that doesn't fit my case any more, but
| that the company silently rewrote descriptions for just to keep
| their review score.
|
| I understand why people want to keep their review scores, etc,
| and to some extent they _should_ keep them, but not at the
| product level, when the product changes.
| userbinator wrote:
| Products that don't behave the same should really have different
| part numbers. In this example, perhaps they could call them SN550
| and SN550A (B, C, etc.) or even SN551, SN552, ... if the majority
| of the design hasn't changed.
| mirker wrote:
| Yes, a great current example is consumer motherboards with
| Intel's I225V network controller. The controller is unable to
| run at 2.5Gbps without a fix. The controller was fixed in
| revision 3, but a huge number of boards are shipping with
| revision 2. This is _two years_ after the issue was identified,
| and there is no way to see which one you will get. Even boards
| manufactured this year have the old NIC, so I assume vendors
| are being shady to liquidate old NIC stock.
|
| So you get sold a motherboard with a 2.5X NIC slowdown compared
| to advertised (it gets downgraded to 1Gbps). Update the figure
| on the box if you're going to do that!
| cwizou wrote:
| This happens a lot with flash in general, mostly because those
| who manufacture the end user product don't usually make the NAND
| (or don't always use their own).
|
| I had the issue with "high end" USB sticks a while back during a
| review. The speeds given are completely irrelevant and always
| based on best case scenarios. And while a few manufacturers stick
| to the same formula for controller + NAND for the life of the
| product (say Sandisk), others just don't care and will silently
| switch both the controller and NAND with 0 indication on
| packaging (no rev., no nothing).
|
| On SSDs I can't remember seeing that though, but then again, this
| is Western Digital we're talking about. A company best known for,
| let's say, being a very late entrant to the SSD market.
|
| Edit : At least they (kinda) owned up to it after being caught,
| quoting the updated article : "For greater transparency going
| forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we
| commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related
| published specifications are impacted,"
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| This happens with products all the time. Strictly "shrink-
| flation" of consumer goods is the same thing.
|
| One industrial vendor we once partnered with took a product P
| that had speed S and accuracy A, discontinued that product and
| replaced with product P1 which was speed S/10 and accuracy A
| paired with product P2 which was speed S and accuracy A/10. The
| original P products were precious if you could find them.
| belorn wrote:
| Silent change in this concept means there is no way to identify
| P2 from P, and both are sold under the same product name,
| product code, product specifications, and same product reviews.
| The later is the key aspect as selling products with the intent
| to trick the consumer is a defining aspect of fraud when done
| intentionally for profit purpose.
|
| While shrinkflation often also intend to trick the consumer,
| the details are usually defined. The packet weight or volume
| number is changed, the weight cost is change (a list
| requirement for many products where I live), the number of
| items has changed. With silent changes however there is no such
| information available and the consumer just will have to hope
| that their P is not P2.
| y04nn wrote:
| Unbelievable, but is there a datasheet available and does the
| datasheet have read/write speed figures?
|
| Edit: [1] The datasheet shows "up to" speeds, which means that it
| is the disk cache speed and not the NAND speed? Quite
| disappointing.
|
| [1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
| library...
| deelowe wrote:
| Don't expect useful specs to be available for consumer drives.
| The datasheets have slowly been turned into marketing materials
| over the past 10 years. Only the devices targeted for business
| use have useful specs and even then, key details such as MTBF
| or similar can be missing.
| cableshaft wrote:
| This happens to video games also. Publishers give review copies
| with microtransactions not included, the reviewers review it, and
| then shortly after release they add their free-to-play garbage so
| they get reviews that don't take the microtransactions into
| account and then they add it later.
|
| The also do it during ESRB submission to get around having to
| have a label that mentions in-game purchases. I'm surprised ESRB
| lets them get away with it, actually.
|
| Jimquisition on it: https://youtu.be/9LeZ89_u2Gc
|
| Article on it: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66889/publishers-
| delaying-mic...
| opdahl wrote:
| One of the latest events like this is Capcoms Resident Evil
| Village which launched with a DRM that added terrible
| stuttering to the PC version.
|
| They only admitted to this and promised a fix when a cracked
| version came out that had the DRM removed and it didn't have
| any stuttering [1].
|
| [1] https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-
| la...
| smoldesu wrote:
| The folks at Digital Foundry did a phenomenal job breaking
| down the specifics, as usual. I strongly suggest checking out
| their video if you're interested in the stuff:
|
| https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM
| pulse7 wrote:
| What are those microtransactions doing? Crypto mining?
| dharmab wrote:
| "Microtransaction" means small purchases. Such as buying a
| randomized pack of in-game unlocks for $1 each.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction
| michaelt wrote:
| The reviewers get sent an account with everything enabled,
| and have a great time playing as Darth Vader Or Han Solo Or
| Whatever.
|
| The general public buy the game, and find if you want to play
| as Darth Vader or Han Solo unlocking them costs $20 each.
| zshift wrote:
| Or playing for hundreds of hours per unlock
| ronsor wrote:
| Or lootboxes, which guarantee you'll spend about $500 per
| unlock.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Sounds like the diesel scandal
| some_random wrote:
| ESRB is industry controlled iirc, and
| microtransations/lootboxes are a huge cash flow for the largest
| games companies
| wiz21c wrote:
| Et voila. Conflict of interests all the way...
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Yeah, it's voluntary self-regulation that was establish to
| stave off laws being passed in the early 90s during the panic
| over Mortal Kombat, Doom, etc. Presumably if legislators
| start looking into microtransactions and rating tricks then
| the ESRB will start taking them much more seriously.
| dijit wrote:
| I work on an upcoming free to play game, we will have
| microtransactions on cosmetics and possibly new character
| archetypes.
|
| Microtransactions are not in the early builds of the game
| because we literally hadn't made the content for it yet, we
| were focusing on the game mechanics.
|
| The store is a lot of work in a game, and the cosmetics
| themselves are mostly content work which is not hyper critical
| to have in place (unlike, say, matchmaking or gun mechanics).
|
| I'm not saying it hasn't been done nefariously; just that: The
| game I'm making doesn't have microtransactions _yet_ because we
| worked on other stuff.
|
| But we're not lying about them being there, they have to be
| there otherwise we'll go bankrupt paying the server costs and
| failing to recoup R&D costs.
| [deleted]
| Dayshine wrote:
| You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that this
| is an early access dev build with all paid content unlocked
| then, right?
|
| I don't think people are talking about cosmetic micro-
| transaction though.
| fencepost wrote:
| _You should be ensuring that all reviewers mention that
| this is an early access dev build with all paid content
| unlocked then, right?_
|
| Sounds like since all the transactions are for cosmetics
| that haven't been made the content simply doesn't exist in
| review copies.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| Bottom line is reviewers are reviewing one version of the
| game, and players are getting a sometimes significantly
| different version. That is anti-consumer behavior no matter
| how you cut it.
|
| Some responsibility does also fall on reviewers for being
| aware and where appropriate mentioning this fact.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I'm not saying all microtransactions are bad necessarily.
| I've also worked on a couple of games that have had them,
| although we did have them on launch (and added more to it
| later).
|
| But it is kind of a shitty move if you let reviewers review
| your game and let them believe there won't be
| microtransactions and then you add them later.
|
| Now if your game is a free game to begin with, it's sort of
| expected you'll add something in there to make money at some
| point. But most of these big AAA games are $60-100+ to buy
| the game to begin with, so there's not an easy assumption to
| make. Also they almost always have it available a few weeks
| after launch, as if they were just waiting to get past ESRB
| and reviewers without mentioning those things.
|
| Finally, I've worked on console games and handled ESRB
| submissions for our games. You're not supposed to leave
| anything out. We got dinged once for not mentioning that the
| card art on one of our cards had a character smoking a pipe
| on it, and another card where the anime girl had a slightly
| exposed nipple (we didn't even notice, it was a port of a
| game by another developer and the card art is busy enough you
| kind of have to be looking for it... if we had known, we
| would have told the developer to edit those out and the game
| wouldn't have had the 'smoking' and 'nudity' label on our
| rating). The video you submit is supposed to show everything
| in the game. And yet these companies aren't doing that so
| they can keep the in-game purchases label off their game.
|
| If you're trying to hide something in your game from certain
| parties, you're being shitty and you should stop, is the
| moral of the story. If you're not you're probably fine.
|
| For the ESRB rating for the game I worked on, here's the back
| of the box for proof: https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/f
| ull_6178352AmericaBac...
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Phone manufacturers do this as well. Release a phone to
| reviewers with awesome performance and battery life (by
| aggressively killing background apps), then a month later,
| release a build that doesn't do those things so people don't
| complain about missed notifications, etc.
|
| Hell, even Apple nuked the noise cancelling in the Airpods Pro
| right after launch [1], possibly for battery reasons or to
| prevent hearing damage lawsuits, but by all accounts they had
| jaw-dropping noise cancelling when the reviewers were writing
| their initial reviews.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069953/apple-airpods-
| pr...
| sebazzz wrote:
| I see a market for a site called "The late review".
| burnished wrote:
| This is kind of a hyperbolic re-write of the linked article at
| Tom's Hardware[1], which is I guess originally sourced (by both
| articles) at a Chinese site called expreview. The linked article
| at Tom's Hardware has more information and more context that is,
| confusingly, left out of the top level article.
|
| [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-blue-sn550-ssd-
| performa...
|
| p.s is it possible to change what the link is to? it seems sort
| of pointless to have a discussion on an article that appears to
| be clickbait, in that it adds nothing substantive and in fact
| neglects to include a lot of information.
| kstrauser wrote:
| WD is on my personal blacklist for now. Don't forget last year
| when they lied and marketed SMR drives as NAS-compatible:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds...
|
| I can forgive hardware failures. Packing a few trillion bits into
| a box and making them perfectly reliable is a hard job. What I
| absolutely cannot and will not forgive is Western Digital lying
| about their specifications. If I can't trust their words, damned
| if I'm gonna trust their products.
| ta988 wrote:
| I'm super happy with my SN850 except those pesky leds that you
| cant turn off from Linux.
| MR4D wrote:
| Why is this not fraud?
|
| If you as a company source a device for reviewers and then change
| the specs in a way that you do not communicate, that is intent to
| defraud.
|
| If you bought a corvette because all the car reviews said it went
| 0-60 in 5 seconds, and then you buy one and it takes 10 seconds
| to do the same thing, you'd have a pretty good argument -
| especially if everyone else experienced your same situation.
|
| I'd be surprised if a class action suit or FTC investigation
| doesn't happens within the next year.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I think it's at least in part because everyone understands (or
| thinks they understand) 0-60 times for cars.
|
| But when you start talking about multi-level caches single-
| level cell memory and the shingled magnetic recording debacle
| and get down to 02031 1T00 SanDisk Flash vs 60523 1T00 SanDisk
| Flash chips and continuous writing performance of more than 12
| GB, eyes begin to glaze over. For most consumers, it's a black
| box, the implementation details are unknowable and irrelevant.
|
| People would be ticked off if the Corvette had an undersized
| radiator that caused it to go into limp-home mode any time you
| took it to the track, we're starting into slightly esoteric
| "car guy" details. But enough people know what a radiator is
| and care about cooling system performance that car
| manufacturers listen. Very few consumers understand the
| workings of an SSD; manufacturers are under a lot less pressure
| as a result.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > But when you start talking about multi-level caches...
|
| No, this is not the point.
|
| The average buyer knows very little about cars or buildings
| but is protected by regulation.
|
| Consumers should not need to be expert to be protected.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| You don't need to understand the workings of a car to get
| that 0-60 in 10s is worse than 0-60 in 5s.
|
| Likewise, you don't need to understand the workings of an SSD
| to get that 10s to copy 1GB of data is worse than 5s to copy
| 1GB of data.
|
| Implementation details are irrelevant here.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| But that's not the case here, it's still 5s to copy 1GB of
| data unless the cache fills up, which many people won't
| normally do.
|
| So the parent post's analogy with an undersized radiator is
| still appropriate, you need to understand the whole system
| to know what its impact on you will be - you can get one
| good 0-60 run, then need to let the car cool down at idle
| for 15 minutes before you try it again.
| havockatie wrote:
| I hate to break it to you but this is EXACTLY what happens
| with a C7 generation Corvette. The C7 generation base
| Stingray, GrandSport and Z06 models do well enough to wow in
| magazine and vlog reviews but when owners got their cars and
| started taking them to track days they realized they started
| over heating after not many laps in under 30 mins.
|
| They are obviously performance oriented machines but mostly
| designed for every day use on the street. They may have big
| brakes, great suspension and a pretty great engine but the
| cooling system included is not equipped to handle a track for
| more than 30 minutes. Within the first month of deliveries
| people were freaking out. After 30 mins the car would go into
| limp mode and you were lucky if you got on the track at all
| again that day.
|
| But guess what? The reviewers never experienced this.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > eyes begin to glaze over
|
| This argument is not especially helpful as a defense against
| a claim of fraud. It does nothing to explain why you'd give
| reviewers devices with different performance than the devices
| you sell.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Technically, you're correct, which is the best kind of
| correct. Yes, fraudulent activity is fraud. But what we
| really care about is whether it's noticed, acted on, and
| eventually prosecuted for.
|
| Pragmatically, when you have enough complexity that
| explaining the fraud is difficult, it's still fraud but
| they're likely to get away with it.
|
| I find it trivial to imagine someone (who's actually
| invested in the problem, and not just trying to make you go
| away) peering at you and asking "OK, so this one has 02031
| etched on one of the components on the PCB, and this
| reviewer says it should be 60523, and you want a full
| refund because you consider that fraudulent? Does the box
| say which kind it's supposed to contain? No? Fine, I see
| that when you copy this enormous disk image, um, it looks
| like it's working? Sure, I can wait another 40 seconds. OK,
| yes, I see that the speed has dropped from about 2000 to
| about to 390. And you're saying they committed fraud
| because it's not supposed to drop? It is, but only to 660?
| Are you sure your disk isn't just filling up? Maybe you
| need to run Windows Update or defragment your hard
| drive...it just finished, was that delay really that bad?
| How often are you copying a file this big anyways?"
|
| The point is that navigating the above conversation, much
| less winning it in a courtroom or having it so often that
| massive numbers of people boycott a manufacturer, is an
| enormous hurdle. Until it's more easily surmountable, it's
| immensely profitable for manufacturers to commit this sort
| of fraud.
| llampx wrote:
| I think you're overstating it. People do recognize and
| hate when they're given a bum deal and it has nothing to
| do with getting into esoteric details.
| beambot wrote:
| > Pragmatically, when you have enough complexity that
| explaining the fraud is difficult, it's still fraud but
| they're likely to get away with it.
|
| This is why you have subpoenas and discovery. It seems
| likely that an internal email chain exists discussing
| intent to deceive. Even for unsophisticated jurors,
| that's enough of a smoking gun to make it an open & shut
| case.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| You are going to get into the same debate had decades ago
| about hard drive size. Base 2 for techs vs base 10 for
| average consumers.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| There's a very good reason Consumer Reports buys from normal
| retail channels.
|
| No Consumer Reports like publication would survive for this
| stuff. They'd be so far behind the other reviewers, even if
| they had better quality data.
| tyingq wrote:
| They seem emboldened by the event where they silently
| introduced SMR into NAS drives. That is, they didn't suffer any
| real consequences there, so now it's a free-for-all.
| alias_neo wrote:
| They must have lost a fair amount of sales?
|
| I previously would never have considered buying Seagate, but
| since the debacle, when it came to replacing a failed drive
| in a ZFS array of WD Red CMR drives, I couldn't trust I'd get
| a drive that would actually resilver so I just replaced them
| all with Seagate IronWolf NAS drives.
|
| The ops team at my work also avoids WD now, and I no longer
| buy WD SSDs or external drives because of this distrust.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| > They must have lost a fair amount of sales?
|
| (Anecdotally) Not from me. SMR or not, their easystore
| drives that you can shuck are _cheap_. Between buying a
| cheap drive and buying something else, I like to spend less
| money, so I 'd choose the easystores.
|
| Granted, I don't know how much has changed with the
| easystores since the SMR debacle since I've not really been
| in the hard drive market for a while.
| moreati wrote:
| For anyone else unfamiliar: shucking is buying a USB
| harddrive purely for the drive inside, discarding the
| outer case/USB interface
| https://www.datahoards.com/whats-the-meaning-of-shucking-
| a-h...
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| > discarding the outer case/USB interface
|
| I'm not really much of a shucker but I do it from time to
| time. That being said, I do save the SATA board and power
| supply (and USB) that I get when I finish the shuck. I
| haven't had to yet, but it possibly could be handy for
| connecting up an internal 3.5" drive externally, like if
| I want to quickly get some data off of it or something.
| gruez wrote:
| AFAIK people who were pissed about the reds getting
| switched to SMR are disjoint from the people who shuck
| stuff. The latter group usually verifies the drives that
| they get, because you're not guaranteed to get a drive
| when shucking.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| One might argue that the changes are marginal and most users
| won't be affected by them. This change hurts write throughput
| for large write workloads, but these workloads are rare anyway.
| dragontamer wrote:
| If you change the specs, people expect your SKU to change.
| Don't call it the SN550 anymore. Call it the SN551.
|
| There's a whole slew of internet benchmarks on the SN550 and
| how it performs on a wide variety of benchmarks. For WD to
| muddle their branding by calling this new, slower drive ALSO
| an SN550, weakens the brand and causes distrust in builders.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| I remember when Linksys (and others) had wireless devices
| that worked really well in Linux. I bought 4 of them and
| got two different versions of the thing with radically
| different insides.
|
| Someone at Linksys must have noticed that SKU X was selling
| really well and looked for ways to cut the cost by
| replacing the innards.
|
| Eventually, online stores were putting the PCB revision
| number in the sale listings because people had to pick a
| specific rev.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I don't think there's any requirement that manufacturers
| guarantee results of third-party reviews for the entire run of
| a product. it probably just has to meet the specs published by
| the manufacturer. as long as you still hit that burst read
| number with some insane queue depth, everything's cool.
|
| the corvette example doesn't really make sense because the
| manufacturer provides their own 0-60 number. if no one can hit
| the manufacturer's number in ideal conditions, that's a
| problem. now if the manufacturer updates their official specs
| to 0-60 in 10 seconds, that would be pretty weird, but not
| illegal.
|
| I remember a similar situation with RAM a few years ago. there
| was some highly sought-after die that could be overclocked way
| outside the official specs. you could buy a couple different
| examples of the same SKU and they would have wildly different
| overclocking limits based on the underlying die. eventually
| that die wasn't produced anymore, so no one got the insane
| overclocks. people were really unhappy about that, but at the
| end of the day, they were relying on behavior that was outside
| the promised specification.
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| It is fraud, but laws against fraud are not generally enforced
| against large businesses in important industrial supply chains
| unless they consistently and repeatedly flaunt it.
|
| I'd be surprised if there _is_ a class action or FTC penalty.
| antasvara wrote:
| The real question is what Western Digital says the speed for
| the drive is. I would guess that the changes don't touch the
| stated top speed, as the article seems to indicate that this
| only slows down write speeds after the cache is filled.
|
| If Western Digital specified an average write speed, this might
| be affected. However, that average could technically not have
| changed depending on how they determined this average speed
| (for example, they could have determined this average by
| downloading and uploading smaller files).
|
| I'd say that Western Digital isn't affecting the 0-60 time in
| ideal conditions, just decreasing the ability of the drive to
| attain that 0-60 time in less than ideal conditions.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The real question is what Western Digital says the speed
| for the drive is.
|
| They say "Up to 1,800 MB/s"
|
| So if they decided to put in flash similar to a samsung 860
| QVO, which drops down to 80 MB/s when the cache is full, that
| would still satisfy the spec.
| speeder wrote:
| Is this number correct? SSD with cache full can drop to
| speeds slower than spinning disk drives?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The low end of QLC is _low_.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-
| ssd...
| speeder wrote:
| Reading those specs... I don't see any reason to buy it.
| It is worse than my current 1 TB WD Blacks (spinning
| disk, not SSD). And much more expensive too! I feel
| disappointed now... I was hoping SSDs would have been
| improved by now enough to make them good value for money
| for someoen that needs crazy amounts of storage.
| onli wrote:
| The SSD will have a much better latency, and will in
| practice lead to shorter load times, even with slow QLC.
|
| But if you need a lot of storage HDDs still have the
| better price per GB.
| sekh60 wrote:
| If you need crazy amounts of storage you are looking at
| enterprise SSDs which do not have this sort of problem,
| not consumer crap.
| chihuahua wrote:
| There's a reason they state the specs using this kind of
| language. Anyone who experiences performance < 1,800 MB/s
| is getting what was promised. And anyone who sees
| performance > 1,800 MB/s is going to be happy.
|
| Where it becomes absurd (and amusing, but still not fraud)
| is when the manufacturer claims "up to XYZ or more!". Any
| number is going to match that spec. So the statement says
| nothing.
| webmobdev wrote:
| You are right - it should be treated as fraud. It's a common
| business practice nowadays to bait and switch - first release
| good quality products, get good reviews for it and then use
| those good reviews to market your product. And after it has
| sold a certain quantity and established a brand value, start
| using cheaper and inferior quality components and extract more
| profit.
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