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

arstechnica.com

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

#51

Post by burnished »

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.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #50
cableshaft wrote: post #19

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 (unli…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by AtlasBarfed »

MR4D wrote: 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…

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.

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

#54

Post by wiz21c »

some_random wrote: post #33
cableshaft wrote: post #19

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…

ESRB is industry controlled iirc, and microtransations/lootboxes are a huge cash flow for the largest games companies

Et voilà. Conflict of interests all the way...

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

#55

Post by deelowe »

y04nn wrote: post #36

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...

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.

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

#56

Post by speeder »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #47
antasvara wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this number correct? SSD with cache full can drop to speeds slower than spinning disk drives?

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

#57

Post by plorkyeran »

some_random wrote: post #33
cableshaft wrote: post #19

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…

ESRB is industry controlled iirc, and microtransations/lootboxes are a huge cash flow for the largest games companies

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.

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

#58

Post by Dylan16807 »

speeder wrote: post #56
Dylan16807 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is this number correct? SSD with cache full can drop to speeds slower than spinning disk drives?

The low end of QLC is low.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...

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

#59

Post by llampx »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #43
bachmeier wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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

#60

Post by beambot »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #43
bachmeier wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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