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It is like those massive PC Magazine laser printer reviews decades back ... nobody cares anymore even the cheapest crud is good enough. Reviews these days are

It is like those massive PC Magazine laser printer reviews decades back ... nobody cares anymore even the cheapest crud is good enough. Reviews these days are rather all about GPU's and CPU's.

jl6 7y ago
My guess is that a decent review of a hard drive takes a non-trivial amount of work: review unit acquisition, test setup, test execution, test repetition, analysis, writeup, publishing, ... And that work needs to be paid for. And nobody buys review magazines any more. And advertising revenue on review sites can only pay for a small handful of SKUs to be reviewed. So only the sexiest, mass-marketest units get reviewed. And the vendors fly under the review radar by flooding the market with so many variants that there isn’t enough funding to review more than a tiny fraction of them. And by the time any headway is made into reviewing current models, new ones are released and suddenly nobody is interested in the old ones, further squeezing the window of opportunity for advertising revenue. And eliminating entirely the incentive for long-term testing. Meanwhile, review sites realise they can get paid more in bribes/freebies/access than in advertising, and either outright compromise their reviews or only report the hits and never the misses. And so consumers are flying blind, trying to extract signal from the noise of furious churn.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > Meanwhile, review sites realise they can get paid more in bribes/freebies/access than in advertising, and either outright compromise their reviews or only report the hits and never the misses. Pretty much. Like the rest of news, accuracy is expensive, entertainment is cheaper, and anyway the audience prefer the latter.
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
  >And so consumers are flying blind, trying to extract signal from the noise of furious churn. I think this is true for almost any product nowadays that isn't in a ridiculously small niche. Most non-niche products on Amazon I've found get a poor score on "FakeSpot". I believe someone even admitted on reddit that he/she was actively creating fake reviews and fake stories about certain boot brands on relevant subreddits. Unfortunately you can't trust anything online anymore. You need to spend hours or days researching the technology or product category in order to make a judgement on the products available.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  Why would the test be difficult and not just automatic as you push a button?
  - wtallis 7y ago
    Putting together a decent automated test suite is possible, but is a significant project for an individual drive reviewer. And any test suite you create is only good for a few years at most before you have to start worrying about new technologies that change performance or power characteristics in a way your tests can't capture. If you were putting together a hard drive test suite a few years ago to use for reviewing consumer/prosumer desktop and NAS drives, testing specifically for SMR behavior may not have been on your radar. If you want to get really thorough, automation starts to be infeasible and unreliable: http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microbenchmarking/ http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microb...
- thanksforfish 7y ago
  I feel like "spec sheet omitted serious detail" is a good signal to avoid a specific brand even if that specific SKU isn't available.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Yes, I've been buying WD for what, 15-20 years (I'm just a domestic user, fwiw) .. these sorts of things signal "we've decided to burn the brand to make short term gains", like when venture capitalists take over.

It is like those massive PC Magazine laser printer reviews decades back ... nobody cares anymore even the cheapest crud is good enough. Reviews these days are rather all about GPU's and CPU's.

jl6 7y ago

My guess is that a decent review of a hard drive takes a non-trivial amount of work: review unit acquisition, test setup, test execution, test repetition, analysis, writeup, publishing, ... And that work needs to be paid for. And nobody buys review magazines any more. And advertising revenue on review sites can only pay for a small handful of SKUs to be reviewed. So only the sexiest, mass-marketest units get reviewed. And the vendors fly under the review radar by flooding the market with so many variants that there isn’t enough funding to review more than a tiny fraction of them. And by the time any headway is made into reviewing current models, new ones are released and suddenly nobody is interested in the old ones, further squeezing the window of opportunity for advertising revenue. And eliminating entirely the incentive for long-term testing. Meanwhile, review sites realise they can get paid more in bribes/freebies/access than in advertising, and either outright compromise their reviews or only report the hits and never the misses. And so consumers are flying blind, trying to extract signal from the noise of furious churn.

pjc50 7y ago
> Meanwhile, review sites realise they can get paid more in bribes/freebies/access than in advertising, and either outright compromise their reviews or only report the hits and never the misses. Pretty much. Like the rest of news, accuracy is expensive, entertainment is cheaper, and anyway the audience prefer the latter.
ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
>And so consumers are flying blind, trying to extract signal from the noise of furious churn. I think this is true for almost any product nowadays that isn't in a ridiculously small niche. Most non-niche products on Amazon I've found get a poor score on "FakeSpot". I believe someone even admitted on reddit that he/she was actively creating fake reviews and fake stories about certain boot brands on relevant subreddits. Unfortunately you can't trust anything online anymore. You need to spend hours or days researching the technology or product category in order to make a judgement on the products available.
tinus_hn 7y ago
Why would the test be difficult and not just automatic as you push a button?
- wtallis 7y ago
  Putting together a decent automated test suite is possible, but is a significant project for an individual drive reviewer. And any test suite you create is only good for a few years at most before you have to start worrying about new technologies that change performance or power characteristics in a way your tests can't capture. If you were putting together a hard drive test suite a few years ago to use for reviewing consumer/prosumer desktop and NAS drives, testing specifically for SMR behavior may not have been on your radar. If you want to get really thorough, automation starts to be infeasible and unreliable: http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microbenchmarking/ http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microb...
thanksforfish 7y ago
I feel like "spec sheet omitted serious detail" is a good signal to avoid a specific brand even if that specific SKU isn't available.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Yes, I've been buying WD for what, 15-20 years (I'm just a domestic user, fwiw) .. these sorts of things signal "we've decided to burn the brand to make short term gains", like when venture capitalists take over.