Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The also do it during ESRB submission to get around having to have a label that mentions in-game purchases. I'm surprised ESRB lets them get away with it, actually.
Jimquisition on it: https://youtu.be/9LeZ89_u2Gc
Article on it: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66889/publishers-delaying-mic...
The general public buy the game, and find if you want to play as Darth Vader or Han Solo unlocking them costs $20 each.
They only admitted to this and promised a fix when a cracked version came out that had the DRM removed and it didn’t have any stuttering [1].
[1] https://www.gamesradar.com/resident-evil-village-pc-patch-la...
Microtransactions are not in the early builds of the game because we literally hadn't made the content for it yet, we were focusing on the game mechanics.
The store is a lot of work in a game, and the cosmetics themselves are mostly content work which is not hyper critical to have in place (unlike, say, matchmaking or gun mechanics).
I'm not saying it hasn't been done nefariously; just that: The game I'm making doesn't have microtransactions yet because we worked on other stuff.
But we're not lying about them being there, they have to be there otherwise we'll go bankrupt paying the server costs and failing to recoup R&D costs.
I don't think people are talking about cosmetic micro-transaction though.
Sounds like since all the transactions are for cosmetics that haven't been made the content simply doesn't exist in review copies.
But it is kind of a shitty move if you let reviewers review your game and let them believe there won't be microtransactions and then you add them later.
Now if your game is a free game to begin with, it's sort of expected you'll add something in there to make money at some point. But most of these big AAA games are $60-100+ to buy the game to begin with, so there's not an easy assumption to make. Also they almost always have it available a few weeks after launch, as if they were just waiting to get past ESRB and reviewers without mentioning those things.
Finally, I've worked on console games and handled ESRB submissions for our games. You're not supposed to leave anything out. We got dinged once for not mentioning that the card art on one of our cards had a character smoking a pipe on it, and another card where the anime girl had a slightly exposed nipple (we didn't even notice, it was a port of a game by another developer and the card art is busy enough you kind of have to be looking for it... if we had known, we would have told the developer to edit those out and the game wouldn't have had the 'smoking' and 'nudity' label on our rating). The video you submit is supposed to show everything in the game. And yet these companies aren't doing that so they can keep the in-game purchases label off their game.
If you're trying to hide something in your game from certain parties, you're being shitty and you should stop, is the moral of the story. If you're not you're probably fine.
For the ESRB rating for the game I worked on, here's the back of the box for proof: https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/full_6178352AmericaBac...
Some responsibility does also fall on reviewers for being aware and where appropriate mentioning this fact.
Hell, even Apple nuked the noise cancelling in the Airpods Pro right after launch [1], possibly for battery reasons or to prevent hearing damage lawsuits, but by all accounts they had jaw-dropping noise cancelling when the reviewers were writing their initial reviews.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069953/apple-airpods-pr...
I was expecting that the silent feature reductions in the automobiles due to chip-shortage would seep into another hardware products sooner or later, In fact I was trying to validate whether there's a need to track 'What has been removed due to chip shortage'[1] and it seems like there's good reason to do it.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/234-what-has-been-removed-due-t... (Disclaimer: I created this platform).
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pragmatically, when you have enough complexity that explaining the fraud is difficult, it's still fraud but they're likely to get away with it.
I find it trivial to imagine someone (who's actually invested in the problem, and not just trying to make you go away) peering at you and asking "OK, so this one has 02031 etched on one of the components on the PCB, and this reviewer says it should be 60523, and you want a full refund because you consider that fraudulent? Does the box say which kind it's supposed to contain? No? Fine, I see that when you copy this enormous disk image, um, it looks like it's working? Sure, I can wait another 40 seconds. OK, yes, I see that the speed has dropped from about 2000 to about to 390. And you're saying they committed fraud because it's not supposed to drop? It is, but only to 660? Are you sure your disk isn't just filling up? Maybe you need to run Windows Update or defragment your hard drive...it just finished, was that delay really that bad? How often are you copying a file this big anyways?"
The point is that navigating the above conversation, much less winning it in a courtroom or having it so often that massive numbers of people boycott a manufacturer, is an enormous hurdle. Until it's more easily surmountable, it's immensely profitable for manufacturers to commit this sort of fraud.
This is why you have subpoenas and discovery. It seems likely that an internal email chain exists discussing intent to deceive. Even for unsophisticated jurors, that's enough of a smoking gun to make it an open & shut case.
No, this is not the point.
The average buyer knows very little about cars or buildings but is protected by regulation.
Consumers should not need to be expert to be protected.
They are obviously performance oriented machines but mostly designed for every day use on the street. They may have big brakes, great suspension and a pretty great engine but the cooling system included is not equipped to handle a track for more than 30 minutes. Within the first month of deliveries people were freaking out. After 30 mins the car would go into limp mode and you were lucky if you got on the track at all again that day.
But guess what? The reviewers never experienced this.
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.
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.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd...
But if you need a lot of storage HDDs still have the better price per GB.
Where it becomes absurd (and amusing, but still not fraud) is when the manufacturer claims "up to XYZ or more!". Any number is going to match that spec. So the statement says nothing.
I'd be surprised if there is a class action or FTC penalty.
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.
I think it's more incredible that we continue to elect governments that let them get away with it.
I tend to buy Samsung and Intel, both working well in my devices.
According to that Wikipedia list, Western Digital does manufacture their own flash, through a joint venture with Kioxia.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/western-digital-advanced-...
It's a generalisation, but be careful of using new Samsung consumer SATA drives (860, 870) if you're using Linux.
The Linux kernel has workarounds in place for the older ones (840, 850 series). But the workarounds for the newer models are only starting to be looked at this week:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203475
Without those workarounds (eg disabling NCQ trim), there are data loss problems.
Fixed support for queued trim was part of the marketing claims for the 860 series. Whatever's going on with the 860 and newer drives requires deeper investigation, because there's plenty of reason to believe that simply applying the old workaround is not accurately targeting the real problem.
It doesn't seem to have any real downsides. :)
That depends greatly on what your software's policy for issuing Trim commands is. Partly because of the dearth of drives properly supporting queued trim, it is common for Linux distro to only run trim commands via cron job, rather than issuing them in real time during a workload.
I’m running Linux on top in WSL1 and VMWare.
Also running Linux on ARM devices which have neither SATA nor PCIx. When I need fast disks in them to compile my C++ code, I simply use a network-mounted drive to build, gigabit LAN is good.
[edit]
smart says they have 631 days of power-on time, so maybe 2019?
[edit]
I seem to remember having issues a while back but I haven't seen any since I upgraded my firmware to RVT04B6Q
Edit: Looking into this further, TechPowerUp, Computerbase and others have mistaken K90UGY8J5B for K9DUGY8J5B. It's an easy mistake to make, and I've done exactly this before. But it completely explains the performance difference. The D that changed to a 0 signifies a switch from 16 dies per package down to 8 dies per package. The digits signifying the capacity of the package have stayed the same. The "B" at the end signifying the generation has also stayed the same, but Samsung didn't introduce 512Gbit TLC dies until a generation after they introduced 256Gbit TLC dies, so on the smaller dies the "B" means 92L and on the larger dies the "B" means 128L.
Wasn't also caching strategy changed with the newer controller? Larger dynamic slc, slower folding speed?
Samsung's drives are still operating with SLC caches that are smaller than the theoretical limit, which means that even after the cache is full, the drive should be able to accept some amount of writes that bypass the cache and have near native TLC performance; flushing the cache can be deferred a bit longer until the drive is actually starting to run out of free blocks, as opposed to typical QLC drives with maximally-sized SLC caches that run out of free blocks at the same point where the cache runs out.
Edit: [1] The datasheet shows "up to" speeds, which means that it is the disk cache speed and not the NAND speed? Quite disappointing.
[1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
So you get sold a motherboard with a 2.5X NIC slowdown compared to advertised (it gets downgraded to 1Gbps). Update the figure on the box if you’re going to do that!
One industrial vendor we once partnered with took a product P that had speed S and accuracy A, discontinued that product and replaced with product P1 which was speed S/10 and accuracy A paired with product P2 which was speed S and accuracy A/10. The original P products were precious if you could find them.
While shrinkflation often also intend to trick the consumer, the details are usually defined. The packet weight or volume number is changed, the weight cost is change (a list requirement for many products where I live), the number of items has changed. With silent changes however there is no such information available and the consumer just will have to hope that their P is not P2.
I can forgive hardware failures. Packing a few trillion bits into a box and making them perfectly reliable is a hard job. What I absolutely cannot and will not forgive is Western Digital lying about their specifications. If I can't trust their words, damned if I'm gonna trust their products.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-blue-sn550-ssd-performa...
p.s is it possible to change what the link is to? it seems sort of pointless to have a discussion on an article that appears to be clickbait, in that it adds nothing substantive and in fact neglects to include a lot of information.
I had the issue with "high end" USB sticks a while back during a review. The speeds given are completely irrelevant and always based on best case scenarios. And while a few manufacturers stick to the same formula for controller + NAND for the life of the product (say Sandisk), others just don't care and will silently switch both the controller and NAND with 0 indication on packaging (no rev., no nothing).
On SSDs I can't remember seeing that though, but then again, this is Western Digital we're talking about. A company best known for, let's say, being a very late entrant to the SSD market.
Edit : At least they (kinda) owned up to it after being caught, quoting the updated article : "For greater transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted,"
Too often I've e.g. bought an Amazon product I've bought before, only to receive Revision 2 that doesn't fit my case any more, but that the company silently rewrote descriptions for just to keep their review score.
I understand why people want to keep their review scores, etc, and to some extent they _should_ keep them, but not at the product level, when the product changes.