Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

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The big difference between the consumer and the industrial grade product of the same specs is usually in the guarantee of reaching those specs consistently, and in more extreme conditions.

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.

> 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.

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".

I wonder how often that is the case (the limits not being stated).

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.

I touched on this point in the comment right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27005552

TL;DR version: This should be dealt with in the law.

So, all we have to do is defeat regulatory capture, and then we can have meaningful advertised speeds. That also might first require getting money out of politics.

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

Agreed for SSD, but some consumer 1Gbps broadband never reaches 900Mbps. Its spec should be corrected rather than "best effort".

This is why the law is there. In many countries the advertised speed has to be within a certain range of the average, or hit that speed a certain percent of the time. So 800-900Mbps average, or hitting 1Gbps 60% of the time could very well fit a "1Gbps connection" tier from a legal perspective.

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.

> 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.

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.

> This comparison is not exact. I haven't seen SSD manufacturers advertise transfer speeds of the interface.

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-...

I get the feeling we might understand the term interface differently. What do you take it to be? To me, the interface is PCI-Express 4.0 4x. The "1950 MB/s write and 4700 MB/s read" are the specifics of the drive's performance.

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...

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