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Comment by post_break | Hacker News Reader

Ship the top tier hardware NVME drives to reviewers, wait a few months then start swapping out slower memory chips, controllers, go through multiple revisions while keeping the same name so when gamers look for reviews they see blinding speeds only to be duped. It's incredible what drive manufacturers are getting away with.

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Linus Tech Tips recently did a video on this practice[1]. Almost every major component was changed but still sold as the same drive. In summary, performance was different though not necessarily in a major negative way. In this case it was an ADATA NVME drive.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K07sEM6y4Uc

>It's incredible what drive manufacturers are getting away with.

I think it's more incredible that we continue to elect governments that let them get away with it.

This doesn't need more regulation. Just stop trusting professional reviewers who are not bound by the existing false advertising laws that the manufacturers/retails already are. If you want to know how something performs, read the specs published by the manufacturer. If they're too shy to say how slow it is, then there's a reason for that!

Yes it does need more regulation. It is fraud and as a manufacturer you shouldn't be allowed to get away with deceptive shit like this.

It might be deceptive, but only because consumers somehow believe product names correspond to unchanging products. They obviously don't, across many industries. Cars keep the same names but change design every few years. Food keeps changing package size and recipe. It's everywhere! They didn't promise not to change it, and the products still conform to the published specs. If you're too lazy to read that from the horse's mouth and rely on outdated 3rd party reviewers, that's on you.

I've also seen this happen with laptops. They'll have a decent Samsung NVMe SSD when reviewers get their hands on the devices, but then after release, they switch it out for a cheaper one that performs much worse, particularly in longer workloads.

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