5 ms·

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 defr

by MR4D 5y ago

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.

tyingq 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.
    - gruez 5y ago
      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.
    - moreati 5y ago
      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-hard-drive/ https://www.datahoards.com/whats-the-meaning-of-shucking-a-h...
      - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
        > 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.
zozbot234 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  [deleted]
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
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.
- theli0nheart 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  > 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.
  - 5y ago
antasvara 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    Is this number correct? SSD with cache full can drop to speeds slower than spinning disk drives?
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      The low end of QLC is low. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...
      - speeder 5y ago
        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.
webmobdev 5y ago
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.
sneak 5y ago
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.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
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.

by MR4D 5y ago

tyingq 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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.
  - gruez 5y ago
    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.
  - moreati 5y ago
    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-hard-drive/ https://www.datahoards.com/whats-the-meaning-of-shucking-a-h...
    - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
      > 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.

zozbot234 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago

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 5y ago
[deleted]

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

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.

theli0nheart 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
bachmeier 5y ago
> 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.
- 5y ago

antasvara 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  Is this number correct? SSD with cache full can drop to speeds slower than spinning disk drives?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    The low end of QLC is low. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...
    - speeder 5y ago
      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.

webmobdev 5y ago

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.

sneak 5y ago

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.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

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.