Live data from Hacker News

Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#41
post #6

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…

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.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

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.

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.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

> 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.

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.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#44

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 l…

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...

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#45

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 l…

Sounds like the diesel scandal

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or playing for hundreds of hours per unlock

Or lootboxes, which guarantee you'll spend about $500 per unlock.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#47
post #6

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…

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 s…

> 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.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#48
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.)

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#49

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.

>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.

Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%

#50

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 l…

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.

Post reply on HN