A consumer laptop screen might do just well in the dashboard of a car but it might also turn yellow. You can't complain because it wasn't meant to be used like that (like operating in 80+C temperatures). Your vacuum cleaner would certainly not last long if you started vacuuming water and construction debris, the kind of stuff an industrial vacuum is built for.
A consumer SSD is not designed to be used for this kind of mining. Regular consumers are more price sensitive and ignore other aspects because they're not tech educated. Many don't even understand what this "mining" entails, just that they could make some money. There's a minority of consumers who went for the cheap stuff and now want to make money off of it by pushing it beyond the stated limits. I honestly don't think they have a leg to stand on.
It's a good thing that not all products are made to meet all expectations because they would cost all the money, all the time.
This is why ISPs advertise "up to" a certain speed and then go on to detail the exact conditions in the terms.
It's ironic OP doesn't complain about SSDs never reaching the theoretical and advertised interface speed. Which is no different from internet speeds not reaching the network interface speed as many others here call an example of being cheated. SSD endurance is far better described than it's performance for the average consumer: warranty expires after "this much" data written in "this much" time.
This comparison is not exact. I haven't seen SSD manufacturers advertise transfer speeds of the interface. They say they support this interface, but the transfer numbers advertised are different. Whether those actually happen is a different story.
In the case of internet connections, they don't usually advertise the "interface speed" either. They advertise actual bandwidth[0]. Yes, nowadays, a lot of providers will advertise 1 Gbps connectivity, which coincides with the interface speeds with which people are familiar. But for example, in my case, advertised speed is 400 Mbps. Over a PON (passive optical network). My transceiver (optical interface) will support much more than that. I've never had a 400 Mbps network interface in my computers. Should I expect them to give me 1Gbps? Turns out, they usually do, but I guess that's more of an exception than the rule.
The issue is when a provider will advertise say 400 Mbps, like in my case, but in practice I'm never able to reach more than say 40 Mbps. In this case, yes, there may be some kind of law based on which this behavior is "lawful" or not.
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[0] Which may be "wire" bandwidth, as opposed to "useful data" bandwidth, so they'll happily count encapsulation, etc, but I'd argue that's somewhat different, although still scummy.
I went to the first consumer grade SSD manufacturer I could think of, Corsair, and lo and behold, the description of the SSD advertises the interface speed [0] as "up to" 1,950MB/s write and 4,700MB/s read.
[0]https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Storage/M-...
According to Wikipedia, PCIE 4.0 4x can sustain more than the spec sheet advertises [0].
The spec sheet advertises 4700 MB/s write and 1950 MB/s read. The interface can handle more than 7000 MB/s in each direction. That's more than twice the advertised bandwidth of this drive.
If what you mean is that the MP600 isn't able to handle the claimed 4700 MB/s "most of the time" or something, than that's fair (I have no idea if that's the case or not). But the "interface" doesn't really come into play, here. The drive is advertised as PCIE 4.0 4x because the 3.0 revision couldn't handle the advertised maximum read specs.
Just like it would seem strange for an internet provider to sell a 400 Mbps (advertised) connection over a 100 Mbps line.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#History_and_revisi...
Wasn't the GP's whole point that those limits aren't stated? Or that they are deliberately misleading, e.g. consumer internet sold as "up to 10 Gbps", but would more accurately be labeled "10 Gbps once in a blue moon".
TL;DR version: This should be dealt with in the law.
If you’re in the US, fortunately, Larry Lessig has been working on fixing both of these issues so we can have meaningful advertised internet speeds:
- rootstrikers.org
- equalcitizens.us
I've looked a bit for an nvme drive for an older computer, so I wasn't looking for the absolute best performance, but rather larger capacity and better endurance for a low price. And all the reviews I have seen had rated endurance numbers.
I've just had a look at WD Blue drives [0], and the spec sheet is easily accessible on their site and gives the endurance in GB written, not some timeframe based on an unknown "normal daily usage".
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[0] I've chosen WD specifically because of the recent shady PMR / SMR drives.
Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting.
The moment you have guarantees on the speed, your prices and speeds are adjusted to make it feasible(the same hypothetical ISP can have 2 customers at 100Mbps, 30 at 10Mbps and 500 at 1Mbps with guaranteed speeds and vastly different prices). In many places you can definitely pay a lot of money and have a connection that is not pooled with your neighbour.
It's the same difference as with the shared hosting and a dedicated machine hosting.
Consumers should be free to violate any and all assumptions with no negative consequences. Especially unstated ones that only people familiar with their business model would know about.
If an ISP advertises 1 gigabit/second internet, consumers should be able to fill that pipe with 1 gigabit of data every second. In practice only a minority is going to do that but it should be possible with no punitive throttling of bandwidth whatsoever.
Think of a "service" you provide. If your employer was expecting you to deliver peak performance 8h per day, 5 days per week, for the rest of your employment with no exception, would you still accept the salary you get now, or would ask an order of magnitude more? It's just that your employment contract and law introduce some "fine print" to allow downtime, and the chance to make mistakes or run at lower efficiency with no (immediate) termination.
Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
...because it could be described and measured precisely. And it's not.
Your "precisely defined and measured" SATA3 6 Gbit/s interface never delivers the 6.000Gbps to you by design (8b/10b encoding). So are all SSDs and motherboards in breach? SSDs rarely hit any of the advertised speed. By comparison their endurance is defined far clearer for the consumer.
Whether it's an SSD or an internet connection they come with clear predefined conditions that are legal* and the customer agrees to. Everything else is high consumer expectations meeting low consumer willingness to pay, or even to understand the relationship.
*Of course there are plenty of illegal and abusive clauses but giving a stated 900Mbps average speed with a 1Gbps contract, or selling an SSD with stated low DWPD don't really fit that description.
> Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
...and now you are talking about "ranges".
Datacenters and ISPs for commercial use can provide very detailed SLAs.
Consumer ISPs refuse to publish metrics or have 3rd party services monitor them to create accountability.
They refuse to provide the most basic SLAs and refuse to adopt any user-friendly quality rating.
> The one caveat is that today all ISPs advertise their plans as "up to" a certain speed very prominently in all marketing material.
I literally started how describing something as "up to" [ostensibly a range] is not outright misleading, if at all. It was also strictly speaking of marketing material and how well you can convey info in one banner.
Seems you're not a stranger of moving goalposts and dodging question. You're selectively arguing some of my points, while so elegantly avoiding others because "oh that's different". Which is a very immature way of pretending to have a meaningful conversation, and a good way of hinting you have no counter for that one.
You're doubling down on your misconceptions. Whatever "they" do it's because it's legal. And I'll be blunt: your definition of what is moral and what things should mean is irrelevant. If you want to be right at any cost you can just keep inventing personal definitions to apply to others but not to you because "that's different".
I made my point at quite some length. If that didn't do it, nothing will.
Firstly you are comparing performance guarantee of a person vs a router. Secondly employment law is a different from consumer law. It's a separate can of worms, with specific clauses for discrimination, etc.
The reason this is important is to limit fraudulent claims, if my business is selling a 1 GB/s internet connection that actually only reaches the speed once a month, and someone is selling 1 GB/s internet connection that works reliably, our marketing material and contract might look the same. I would be defrauding the consumer and my competitor.
GP's claim was based on the same misunderstanding you make now regarding that marketing material:
> if my business is selling a 1 GB/s internet connection
You're doubling down on the same mistaken assumption. I randomly browsed over ISP websites just now and they all sell "up to xGbps" connections. Marketing material anyway can't cover the breadth and scope of an actual contract. So it's the job of the law to decide what "up to x" can mean (you deliver that speed at least 60% of the time for example), and for the terms for the specifics of that particular contract.
Just because we don't like something doesn't mean they're breaking the law or that there's a moral obligation on one side to satisfy all claims for the other.
No marketing material is 100% accurate because you can't cram all the things that need to be said in one punchline. But if you enter an agreement based on that one marketing claim then surely the problem isn't with the provider.
I would love to see this fantasy world - I have been with 5 different residential broadband providers in the past 8 years, not a single contract contains SLAs nor do they give any indication of how their speeds or latency stack up in practice. Calling the Virgin Media customer line does not produce any usefull information either, and their sales staff cannot answer basic questions.
Even worshippers of 'mah free market' should be able to see the problem: I was looking for the best provider money can buy, and I ended up stuck in year-long contracts with companies that actually provide a crap service, because the only way to know is trial and error. My money should have gone to the best company instead.
>"Just because we don't like something doesn't mean they're breaking the law or that there's a moral obligation"
I think we have a moral obligation not to defraud others. Casually I define it as misleading people into parting with their money or causing them to suffer losses. To me that includes selling herbal cures that you know are fake, homeopathy, or inviting people to a restaurant telling them you'd pay and then taking off as the tab arrives. None of these activities are actually crimes.
There's no need for condescension especially in this case. I live in that fantasy world where I get exactly what I pay for. It's not a guarantee that every country has the same consumer friendly laws but even here it's perfectly acceptable to sell an "up to 1Gbps" connection that falls shy of the marketing.
> not a single contract contains SLAs
If they didn't it's because you chose to pay less for one that has no SLAs. I have a consumer and a business contract from the same provider at my home address. The consumer one offers higher speed for lower price but offers no guarantees except the legal baseline. The business connection on the other hand lists for example minimum, maximum, and "normal" speeds, clearly states that there is no data cap or throttling, and the SLA for restoring connectivity is within 8h, and more.
The only way for marketing material to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is to be the contract itself plus the relevant law. Anything else will be concealing some information.
> My money should have gone to the best company instead.
The problem is that you have a low limit for what you're willing to pay for, but a high limit on what you are asking for. It's a typical consumer education issue.
> I think we have a moral obligation not to defraud others.
Look, no offense but this is rant territory. You use your personal definition of "defrauding" to make the case that suits you best. Your SATA interface never actually reaches 6.0Gbps, your SSDs almost never reach the advertised speeds, your electricity isn't exactly 120/240V or exactly 50/60Hz. Your steak isn't exactly 200g. Your car doesn't consume exactly 7.9l/100km. and not all McDonalds chicken nuggets are the same size.
If it helps you understand the point, try to apply the same standards to yourself to see why guarantees cost.
Show me one marketing banner that you consider valid and let me nitpick. We'll either find out that no banner in the whole world is honest, or that you can nitpick anything.
You are missing the point: money was never the problem. My current provider is miles better than my previous one, but you could not tell that by comparing contract or marketing material. So I could not select the best firm, so they lost out on business, so the market is not functioning as it should. You brough up SLA, I don't need an SLA for SLA's sake.
I think it is unfair to compare a different market entirely
>"your electricity isn't exactly 120/240V or exactly 50/60Hz"
Your residential internet provider can just throttle you willi-nilly. On the contrary, electricity gris has to follow very strict rules, and if the voltage drops by half we call ot a brownout. The entire country comes to a halt and executives have to answer some tough questions.
Similarly car milage cones from tests inaccordance with specific methodology, they cant just slap a number that's wrong by a factor of 2 and call it a day, but Virgin Media can.
The electric grid is regulate as such, to define the acceptable ranges. ISPs are regulated differently but the law still defines acceptable ranges for their service. They either don't prohibit, or even explicitly allow saying "up to 1Gbps" while offering lower for example. If you find the practice bad look to change the law. Internet should be regulated like a utility.
You make a case for having a crappy ISP experience but not for them deceiving you because you bought an "up to 1Gbps" connection and get less than the upper bound. You could get some guarantees but you didn't want to pay. Most things you pay for deliver lower than the upper bound, by how much determines if it's fraud or not, depending on the law.
> car milage cones from tests inaccordance with specific methodology, they cant just slap a number that's wrong by a factor of 2 and call it a day
It's very ironic that until just now you insisted "the consumer is being defrauded with fraudulent claims" and now you justify equally unrealistic numbers in other scenarios like car fuel or pollution numbers (don't get me started on how they measure PHEV fuel efficiency, factor of 2 would be great). So you willingly accept equally fraudulent claims if they're obtained in an irrelevant standardized test. Do you really think Virgin Media couldn't pass a "standardized test" with flying colors? By your own admission it's no longer fraudulent because they did a speedtest against their own servers and it came out great.
How many times will you switch tracks like this and just throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks? It looks to me like your argumentation is very poorly thought out, and you wobble between conflicting ideas, or misunderstood ones. You moved the goal posts around so much neither of us knows where they'll pop up. I get you have a bad ISP but their problem isn't the marketing slogans unless you go for the most superficial of reasoning.
What stops them from providing this information to consumers? They can just measure their network performance and provide these statistics.
Where I live they don't.
> Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
Because consumers deserve more protections in general. ISPs know exactly what they're doing, they shouldn't be able to mislead consumers by promising performance they can't deliver.
TANSTAAFL
Look at the cost of business internet. It's guaranteed. If it says 100 Mbps then you're going to get it with effectively no interruptions. But you're also paying 5-10x more than a consumer connection, because the ISP can't resell some of that connection that you don't use.
That's okay. What's not okay is suddenly punishing users who for some reason decided to use a lot of bandwidth because they were under the impression that they could.
I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling.
What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.
But you can't really expect to max out 100/100 24/7 all year long on a consumer pipe. It is overprovisioned and assumes that most won't be utilizing theoretical maximum all the time. Just as the coffee maker.
My employer with 400 onsite employees (in noncovid situation) has provably worse transfer speed & latency than my household with our consumer 1 Gbps connection. I expect them to pay at least 100x more for it. But its a bank, they can't do differently - they never had connection issue in last 10 years I work there. If they ever had, the team of experts would have fixing it as their top priority.