people trust reviews, that's why
Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low end of QLC is low . https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...
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.
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.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#73Ship 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.
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.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#74This 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 (unli…
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/full_6178352AmericaBac...
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low end of QLC is low . https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...
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.
If you need crazy amounts of storage you are looking at enterprise SSDs which do not have this sort of problem, not consumer crap.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#76Why 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…
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…
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.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#77WD 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.
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 workaro…
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
k, I probably should have said "newer" (than 850 model) rather than "new". The 870 model though, is pretty new. :)
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 workaro…
> 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.
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. :)
Re: Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
#80This 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…
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...