I've had that much acknowledged from SSD vendors, each one blames the others for the benchmark wars but they all know that benchmarks are out there and customer

I've had that much acknowledged from SSD vendors, each one blames the others for the benchmark wars but they all know that benchmarks are out there and customers will chose the SSD based on the published benchmarks so they tune the firmware to make sure they don't look bad in the benchmarks. I was even told that an SSD was made to work consistently over the life span but drop some of these consistency work (i.e. slow downs at start of life) and only kick them in after so many power-on-hours so that it will not look bad in benchmarks. It's a fact of life that customers rely on benchmarks and that vendors cannot educate all customers so the masses out there need to see a good benchmark so that's what gets optimized for.