@@nee-grow What it have to do with capitalism? The free-market makes competition and the better companies will beat those bad companies (like said in the video, Samsung is doing the best, this kind of propaganda and costumer trust is what beats those bad apples, not leftist politics). I can bet your leftist politics wouldn't make things better, since it never did and never will... And the biggest problem of those things aren't capitalism, it is because there is always a "hand of the government" over it. And why you leftist always needs to push up your political propaganda everywhere? Everybody is tired of you guys, you guys are the memes of the internet... I never saw a leftist that truly understand economics.
@@sophiacristina Free market? Lol. I don't think so. In a free market non essentials don't get to sit at home with their thumbs up their butts living off the essential workers who just happened to make the correct life choices and now were forced to support those who were "working" from home or didn't have a job altogether. What we need is a political party to get rid of those non essentials, they are a drain on society.
@@nee-grow How does they have to support those who were working from home? Are they obligated to pay those who work from home? Aren't they better paid than those? Aren't they free to choose another job? Do you think government regulating it would make it better? If they were a drain to society, in the free-market, nobody would pay them and they would get bankrupt, what makes them survive is that government pay for big companies to not get bankrupt, that is the opposite of free-market. Such a naive... Nobody is forced to nothing, people pay what they like and what they want, are you going to control the consumers choice? Are you jealous that some people receive more interest than you? What is your job? Let me see if i think it is essential or if i would pay you by my FREEDOM OF CHOICE!
@@PSYCHOV3N0M imo that's different in that it's not up to the console manufacturer. Here, the SSDs are "up to", depending on the components they themselves use to make the SSD. The consoles are advertised as "up to" 4k120hz, and are build by the manufacturer to support that. It's third party developers that then determine the actual output depending on how optimized their game is, which results in different games implementing different solutions (some even offering a lower res/fps but better graphics, higher res/fps but lower graphics toggle).
@@PSYCHOV3N0M Most games can not run at the highest resolution AND highest frame rate simultaneously. Also, you won't be able to if you don't have a 4K 120Hz display. So the "UP TO" makes sense, it's supported but not a requirement for game developers.
Big respect for calling out the cheating corporations who use false advertising money to create a false image for themselves online, especially big tech lately
@@dertythegrower You know what. Most of the time. Its just bullshit and consumers are wrong. but this time im surprised to see. This isn't a consumer ignorance problem but its actually false advertising. The world really is ending holy shit
I've always hated when spec numbers say "*up to". I feel that companies should state minimum performance expectations for products like this and be held accountable for lying if they fail to meet those expectations.
And people should be forced to buy quality components if they want those specs in real world. Quit buying cheap PSUs and MBs. Use a UPS. You want the manufacturers to play ball while you sit on the bench or not even show up to the game! See it ALL THE TIME. CHEAP P.O.S. PSUs especially.
@@capnobvious2718 not everyone can afford it, I use nearly 10yo hardware because it's cheaper and still does what I need it to do, I haven't got thousands of dollars to buy brand new top of the line parts
This is where I give Sony's Memory Stick format some props. While contemporary SD Cards often advertised higher maximum transfer speeds than Memory Stick on paper, Sony actually listed their Memory Stick _minimum_ transfer speeds, while SD Cards generally do not (and also rarely, if ever, even approach their theoretical maximum speeds). This means that despite their lower max speeds, Memory Sticks were far more likely to perform at their adverised level of performance, and also outperformed comparable SD Cards in real-world usage. It's too bad the format is proprietary and costs so damn much.
Imagine that - no cancel culture, no censorship, no propaganda, no social division, no depressions and phone addictions for the millenials... I'd trade all the social media there is for the 90s and early 2000s to come back and undo the damage it has done...
@@Qtechbh you're comment was going somewhat well unless you said "phone addictions for millennials" and that really showed a deeper insight into your thought process
That don't help if they change the product AFTER the review! We can't expect the reviewers to test every product once a month. This should be prosecuted as fraud with a fine 10x the revenue for the product!
@@henrik.norberg Unfortunately, those with the means make the politicians pass laws that limit fines like this. I would love to put these companies into significant debt for stepping this far out of line, but the penny pinching lobbying they do means it's more economical to do this scummy activity and pay whatever piddly fine if and when they do get caught. But, the question I have, is this ACTUALLY illegal? Not should it be (after all, it's a different product with different core parts being sold as the same thing, this isn't like we're selling two cars under the same name when they only have a different paintjob). And my guess is no.
Man, this kind of things are why I'm glad channels like LTT exist, a normal customer like me who doesn't have 8 ssd to test would have just gotten screwed at full retail price.
This issue wouldn't really be important to most normal customers. It is however, important to call out the manufacturers and help prevent more serious abuse.
@@shaun6828 How tf is it not an issue for normal customers, they're selling you something that has less performance and longevity than what you're paying for and obviously if you're buying an nvme ssd you care about the read and write speeds if you didn't mind the extra loading times, slow boot up, slow file managing, etc then you would just buy a HDD that has twice the storage capacity for less than half the price.
First of all, "bait-and-switch" sales tactics ARE indeed illegal. Believe me, I'm in the sewing machine industry and this industry was one of the biggest abusers of bait-and-switch back in the day. The problem is...PROVING it is quite difficult. Especially in this area where the data and specifications are so subjective. You mentioned the "up to 3500 MB/s" thing. It really is the sleazy way around some of that. Thankfully, channels like this one exist in order to at least try and hold these manufacturers accountable.
@@rendomstranger8698 I think you're right, if it can be proven. I think the obvious hardware changes which LTT has pointed out go a long way in establishing that some drives cannot, under even ideal circumstances, reach their advertised speeds.
According to his title he’s accusing these corporations of swapping components. That’s easy to prove. Just open two of them up. If they don’t have the same components it’s bait and switch!
Hey man if I bought a rain suit for my motorcycle riding. I only have a motorcycle not a car so I have to worry about the crazy storms that pop up out of nowhere here in florida. Can I shorten that rain suit because I think it was meant for tall people and I'm not tall at all.
its not only with ssd! i brought Corsair Platinum DDR4 few years ago on amazon...then, 2 years later i want to brought exactly the same ones.Same part nr. even same amazon link! What i get, was a Corsair Platinum that changed from dual ranked to single! i my point of view its scam!
@@Knebebelmeyer well with ram most brands don't make their own dram modules. Crucial does (Micron owns them) but the other major manufacturers (Samsung, Hynix, Nanya) don't sell enthusiast RAM themselves. For RAM of certain specific specs you are guaranteed the same IC (for example 3200CL14 is always Samsung B die) but if you are buying lower spec RAM like 3200CL16 then it just uses whatever was cheapest/available at the time.
Can confirm in Southeast Asia. When I went to a PC store 3 months ago, the owner was selling three variants of ADATA XPG SSDs (same box, same model) at different price points because he said there are performance differences. I didn't understood it then until Linus explained it now.
So i bought a SP A55 Sata SSD earlier this week, specifically because it was advertised as having a certain Phison controller, which for my use case is literally the best DRAM less Controller out there. The drive i got uses a 2 year older Silicon Motion Controller that misses some key features of the phison. Given that the Controller was explicitly named on the sales page i am thinking of returning it, simply because i feel lied to.
Idk where you live but in the UK at least returning things is so easy and you'd without a doubt be able to get your money back from the seller/retailer, or your bank would step in and refund it anyways!
Actually every "up to" performance specification should be illegal for any product priced accordingly with their performance.. I mean no one buys SSDs for sexy looks, people don't buy (solely) for the brand-name too.. Only criterion is performance and relability for the price. For such products, norm for techical specifications should be "At least X amount of performance at Y condition" sentences.. Like "Up to 3500MB/s and at least 3000MB/s sequential when drive is empty, up to 390K IOPS and and at least 220K IOPS when drive is 60% full and doing combined read/write operations" Manufacturer should have legal obligation to meet that "at least" criteria.. SSD is not the worst part of this "up to" BS.. Pay for "up to "50Mbps internet", get 28Mbps max.. Can't sue, can't get out of a year-long contract.. If I knew I'd be getting 28Mbps, I would have opted for the cheaper 24Mbps package.. This is technically legal but ethically, its fraud.
Amen. I'd say they should allow testing but then again my old house i had 1gig service from Spectrum (980 tested by them) then 2 days later never more than 280. They replaced lines after I told them what's up, router, modem and nothing. They would just test to 98Mbps then leave and it would get no more than. 240 after. Once Ziply finishes their fiber lines in my area I'm swapping ASAP
"Only criterion is performance and relability for the price" another important stat is TBW (how many terabites of writes it's rated for), not that relevant for gaming SSDs, but very important for an OS drive
This is kind of why i swore off buying from non oem ssd brands. Just buy wd/crucial/samsung because they make their own nand. WD even has their own controller these days.
I just fucking bought an A data sx8200 512gb, I just started the video but I hope it’s not super bad news for me. Edit: Did I understand correctly that the only bad thing that happened was -10% performance?
I would think that people don't like being charged the same as the original product if they came clean people would buy with faith knowing what they were getting.
@@kalvenzander4710 Huge difference between doing research on the internet and buying 5-12 times the same product for that same research just to see if you should've bought some other product. A lot of this stuff isn't known and therefore research won't do you much good. Secondly, if a person on the internet claims something in regards to these kind of things, it doesn't have to be true. Thirdly, not everyone will go and spend a huge amount of hours just to research. "Do I like the product?", "Do I need it?", "What's the difference in features?", "What am I really paying for?" and then also "Does the product I have in mind swap components after it's initial release and then sells it like it's the exact same product?" I usually ask way more questions to be honest. I hate buying things. Way too much research needed to not spend way too much money or just to get what you want.
This video posted in June - It's like Samsung watched and it went "Wow, you guys were swapping parts without telling us we could do that too?" Samsung got discovered swapping out parts in August.
Swapping out parts is not the issue here, if you watch the video to the end you'll notice Linus states that specifically. There is no issue with swapping out parts for other brands and not advertising it, the problem is when parts are swapped and they no longer meet the specification of the original. Its perfectly fine to swap parts, and its an industry standard practice dating back to the beginning of the computer industry, as long as the swapped part is as good as the part its replacing.
@@bingokemski4473 Your not reading what I posted accurately, or what linus himself has said in this video even. im not saying that there was no performance decrease, what I said was normally meaning in most circumstances it is perfectly okay and legal to substitute parts for equivalent alternatives, and is done regularly without issue, and is nothing to worry about. Obviously in this case they are cheating the end user, but the point im trying to make is NORMALLY there is nothing wrong with parts substitutions, so long as the substituted part meets or exceeds advertised specs. NORMALLY!!!
Imagine being a reviewer and spending a trillion hours benchmarking a product then finding out a year later that your recommendation is almost meaningless and that you've been stabbed in the back
It's always so good to see people with large audiences sticking up for end users and accountability. It would probably be really easy to collect some palm grease money from manufacturers instead, but LTT keeps doing a good job of pointing these things out. Kudos!
@@black_platypus I dunno, the fact is I'm betting the tech industry is too cheap to throw the sorta money at LMG to make them consider it. There's always a tipping point between reputational damage and financial gain but is that tipping point within the acceptable range of the company trying to buy them especially *when* it inevitably leaks. For smaller channels that tipping point is a lot smaller and the fallout less widespread but once you get past a certain size it would only end badly for all involved. Hence why companies try to buy and bully the smaller channels but can't really use the same dirty tricks with bigger outlets.
Who is too say Linus and the gang did not go all mafia style on Adata? And Adata thought they were bluffing? "you are going to pay me and the boy's really well son, really well indeed, and if you don't, then everyone and their grandma's will know about it on youtube. You never know.
This happens with RAM too! I bought two different kits of Corsair Vengeance RGB, both of the same model number, at two different points in time... They were using two different manufacturers of memory chips on them.
@@Busy_Child even crucial does it , it happend with the ddr2 ballistix that were awesome with micron chips and 2 years later they swapped for cheap modules that didnt even handle specifications
I mean, I've seen that before, and it's annoying but if the performance is similar enough, I don't have a problem with that, the problem is when the performance gets a significant hit or the performance of some samples are too irregular. But that's hard to prove without reviewers so, we need more of this type of analysis.
Finally! Someone with a lot of influence using it for good! Telling people to stop buying their products will force these companies to stop these practices.
@@apocalypseap If sites are already reporting on it like the one he showed in the video I think they will be in some hot water for a while. It takes years to win back customer trust.
Yeah but it will be engrained in conscious consumers minds that Adata and others can sell you lower end components on high end drives so on the high end just go for vendors like Samsung. Those will be the SSD's recommended by tech heads to their families and friends.... And they trust their tech heads. It will just engrain that these companies are best for low end components. That is how providing lower tier components works. They will be the AMD tier cpus before their 180 turn they made with ryzen; Even non tech heads avoided it when on the high end. So I hope these companies likewise change.
Nearly a year later and when buying a new nvme ssd yesterday, I specifically excluded these brands because of this video. Hopefully brands realize that when they are caught engaging in scummy practices, potential consumers will remember.
Beginning = "the same thing is happening at reputable websites like New Egg and Microcenter." Ending = "just like we tell everybody to stick to buying technology and computer hardware at microcenter." 🤣🤣🤣
@@PAPO1990 No I totally agree! I just found it funny that the end sponsor happened to be the same store that he mentioned in a semi negative way, in the beginning of the video. Regardless I still love LTT and Microcenter.
@@PAPO1990 It becomes the retailers problem when they repeat the claims and it makes me think LTT is about as trustworthy as ADATA. Because in effect what LTT has done is say hey there's a problem going on with these guys. Then they go and depend on that organization for their income. It's the journalism equivalent of regulatory capture. IMO that makes everything LTT says suspect. Because while it may not directly be on Microcenter for these problems LTT's job is to look out for us not Microcenter. LTT should be steering us away from potential problems. Maybe say something like, stick to Samsung via Microcenter until this is dealt with or buy direct from Samsung to penalize all the players letting this happen. Yet they are still accepting income from an organization involved in the problem and steering us right in to it. It exposes the problem with market based regulation. The idea that consumer power alone can regulate industry. Because Microcenter and LTT have competing financial interests to concern themselves with. Do they care more about their viewers/customers and the income raised through that revenue stream or their sponsors/supplier discounts and that revenue stream/profit potential.
#1 - Thank you for doing this kind of research and making companies liable for this sort of thing. #2 - I have to give Linus the award for the best handling of advertising merchandise/sponsors, as it is not intrusive or smacking you in the face in the very begging of the video. Plus, the way he brings up the store merchandise/sponsors is hilarious to me.
But they arent... the specs say UPTO not minimum. There is a reason they use these terms so they can do this and it not be illegal. So technically not illegal, but definitely shady
@@michaelhanson5773 It's like if I want to buy anything in stores here in Germany they always promote the price with "ab xy€" which blankly means starting from xy€. So if they say starting from 2€ for a tshirt, there is no reason why a tshirt in the shop can't cost 30€. It's all technically correct, but just a big scam
I remember moving into my first apartment and having Comcast. I was paying for 75Mb/s, but never got more than 20. I hounded them for months before they finally replaced the cables coming into the building and got me up to speed. I can't believe the fcc still let's these companies use such a loose standard
a few years ago, Austalian NBN Co and "resellers" where caught out with their sale speeds, 25/50/100Mbit speeds, and the copper capacity and infrastructure for some of the lines couldnt handle it, yet the providers still charged for it. there was huge outcry when word got out, massive fines for resellers, and then they where forced to disclose the "expected throughput" of the data. Even the CVC ratios meaning that if you paid for 100Mbit, you only ever got an average of 87Mbit between peak-times. (all has to be disclosed now). Sad we got to this point, no more honest companies out there
You want bad. I had to get the FCC involved when it came to AT&T. Well my internet would shut off every day from 9am to 6pm due to the phone lines being 40-60+ years old and AT&T refused (until the government got involved) to replace them. Now my internet works at the crappy 10Mb/s...which ironically is faster than what I was getting before my internet issues happened.
@@Dany1239 Your 2TB is actually 2TB. It's just Windows that can't make its mind, as far as i know, if you boot Linux (or set Windows to report sizes accurately if that's possilbe) you'll see your .19TB back, which was never gone, but your files will also appear bigger. You have 2TB, clear cut.
@@Dany1239 I think that the reason why it's reported like that is because 1TB is not 1000GB in Windows' eyes, it's 1024gb. Or maybe I might be totally wrong.
(Just to clarify for anyone taking you literally) up to 90% off sales at stores usually means a few of the store's items are at 90% off, And many other items are available cheap just at less of a discount. not that 90% of the store is on sale for a certain discounted rate (usually). Just putting that out there in case someone reading this ignores a good sale thinking its something else.
It would be like if next year's Mustang GT was advertised to have an 800hp V8 but actually shipped with a 500hp V6 and Ford didn't say anything to warn customers.
@@potater6163 You're saying that like it's a small thing. Wow dude, Seriously that's your point ? FACT - People who use the wrong YOU'RE vs YOUR are idiots it's not like that's a minor detail. Doing so shows you don't give a shit, which then in turn promotes laziness whicn in turn promotes a lower level of education and intelligence and.... YOU LITERALLY JUST PROVED THAT if it's a typo, that's one thing , but you see, in the 70s WE PAID MORE ATTENTION TO WHAT WE WROTE (Now.. granted,.... that was because we didn't have a keyboard or a backspace button and we were writing A LETTER and if you made a mistake you had to stop and either start again or .. Get a rubber and rub it out , which always made the paper look like shit anyway ) so.. Since we knew the consequence WE PAID MORE ATTENTION THE BACKSPACE BUTTON HAS MADE YOU LAZY SOCIAL MEDIA HAS MADE YOU EVEN MORE LAZY the fact that you can sit behind a keyboard and tell someone to get fucked WITHOUT THE CONSEQUENCE OF GETTING PUNCHED IN THE HEAD Makes you more lazy Now you amplify that by like 2 Decades and you have a bunch of lazy idiots that don't give a fuck and the end result of it all is................. WE GET A COMMENT LIKE YOUR ONE i understand your point mate, but YOU REALLY CHOSE THE WRONG EXAMPLE and the fact you chose this example SHOWS YOUR MENTALITY and ... You can't debate , argue or ignore that point YOU SAID WHAT YOU SAID AND YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU BELIEVE and it's all as a result of historical conditioning DOES THAT MAKE SENSE Your and You're are important for very good reasons it's the same as people can't be bothered to type I'm so they type im ONCE UPON A TIME RULES FOR LANGUAGE WERE INVENTED AND IT WAS FOR GOOD REASON PEOPLE ARE NOW IGNORING THOSE RULES AND WHEN THAT HAPPENS LANGUAGE HAS TO EVOLVE but the word EVOLVE implies TO MOVE TO SOMETHING BETTER Now.. if language is not efficient then it should evolve BUT IN THIS CASE, IT IS AND PEOPLE ARE IGNORING THE RULES MEANING..... language will De-Evolve and we'll have to try to this dance again in a few generations so where you think it doesn't matter IT ACTUALLY REALLY REALLY DOES MATTER
Western Digital's reputation took hit when they silently switched some of their NAS hard drives to slow and inferior SMR technology. It is hard to trust them after that.
Seagate done it too with the Barracuda and the Exo drive, but all the blame was on WD, so they didnt got too much spotlight like WD did. This is like the Volkswagens emission scandal. They got the blame, but all of the car manufacturers done the same exact thing.
@@TrancemasterOnyx from 12TB and upwards there's a pretty slim chance of getting shingled drives. Especially the external 12TB & 14TB drives can be pretty solid HDDs. Almost all of them can be shucked as well.
@@talos86 Nah. Western Digital literally lied about it, "None of our NAS drives use SHR!" www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313#comment:16 WD is far, far, far worse than Seagate & Toshiba. Anybody claiming "lmao, they're all the same" seems to have only skimmed the headlines!
This has been going on for years. I remember buying a mother board for its ability to overclock as reported in all the reviews. Once I had it, and it didn’t overclock at all, I went onto the forums, turns out the boards sent for reviewers were using special pre production chips and the production boards were inferior. Company response: 🤷🏼♀️
Why is "up to" even accepted as a legitimate metric? A minimum speed would make sense because we want things fast, not speed "up to" whatever. No doubt this was the very reason this wording is used.
I think it's because drives have drastically different minimum speeds depending on the situation. For example, a very long stresstest can make performance drop and having a filled drive also makes it suffer. Putting "minimum speed of 100MB/s" on the box isn't as attractive as "up to 3500MB/s". I agree it is a stupid metric, so I stick to IOPS, since that metric is way more reliable
Exactly my thought. Everytime something has a variable performance, it should be required to give a "minimum" number. No more "depends on the rest of the stuff you use" BS.
No matter what kind of drive, if u test them under absolute worst case scenario, minimum speed will be close to 0 mb/s. No point advertising minimum speed.
@@vladdx Maybe were sold in Europe, afraid of laws and consumer associations. Not my country, but in Germany they care, a lot, TV programs just for products quality, consumer rights, etc. Maybe. I don't know. They even fucked electric companies with the data acquisition from smart meters.
Kingston has been doing this for a decade, you know... They replaced the controller on their old V300 SSDs after the initial wave of positive reviews went out.
Ya and they do it on their RAM which I think is even more of an issues. Awesome when you buy the exact same model and can't OC them together because they use different chips.
They replaced the flash memory too. I still have one of those downgraded Kingston v300 drives. Lower performance than advertised, but surprisingly it's been working almost non stop for 7-8 years as a boot drive and hasn't failed yet.
@@coffeemaddan I already didn't trust them unfortunately. My WD drives I had in my systems pretty much ALL died a sudden unexpected death with maybe a week notice of unreadable sectors then they just quit showing up on the SATA bus. And they were all in regular desktop use cases with 20min SMART shutoff times to reduce heat and wear. But on the other hand, all of my spinning rust drives I have left are Seagate and I have had only 1 fail in the last 20 years of using them in home servers and computers of all types. I still have some Barracuda drives from the mid 90's that work perfectly in my Pentium iii 700mhz machine.
@@PINKBOY1006 I agree with @Jacob, I have mostly WD drives from 7 year old blue's to 1 year old red's (cmr), the only wd drive that every failed on me was a refurbished one and that failed after 24 hours so not that much of a problem cause there wasnt much on it and it was still possible to get data from it. On the other hand, I have a 2tb seagate drive with now 51k hours as it is idk 8 or 9 years old and this one as well still works
This has been my concern due to the supply chain disruptions, that manufacturers were cutting corners and you've proven that I wasn't being overly skeptical.
Has been going ob forever but I remember them doing the same thing with SSDs shortly after they first became available to the public and I remember NVIDIA doing it with the 1080 (and are still doing it). And have you seen how hard it is to RMA an SSD or HDD? Until there's massive lawsuits nothing will change.
TBH, Kingston has been doing this for a loooooooooong time. Theyve been caught with their pants down before sending cherry picked SSDs with MLC NAND to reviewers but when the drive hit retailers they came with TLC NAND instead.
And people still bought them because they didn't give a shit, so nothing really happened. No one is being responsible for their actions anymore. So the same shit keeps happening again and again.
@@viedralavinova8266 That's the sad reality. most people don't really need peak performance out of their hardware or hell, even performance living up to marketed specs after all. what most people need are products that perform decently to their use cases, which ain't much most of the time, that they don't need to fork shit tons of cash for... & for better or worse, the corporations out there are well aware of that & counting on such mentalities to do business...
11:45 Well that didn't age well. Samsung has also been caught switching components of their SSDs. Quite funnily enough only 2 months after this video was released Samsung got caught making a revision to 970 Evo Plus without announcing it or creating a 970 Evo Ultra SKU or something like that. And what's even more funny is that I also got duped by this and only recently noticed the change. I bought my original 1TB 970 Evo Plus with the original controller in 2020 and I bought another, supposedly identical, 1TB 970 Evo Plus in October 2021 and only later through Samsung Magician I noticed that the firmware version of the new 970 Evo Plus was different, 2B2QEXM7 vs 4B2QEXM7. Because of that firmware version difference I started googling and what I gathered from the reddit thread that was made at the time of the "scandal" was that 970 EVO Plus with the new controller was slower than the old one but could sustain its top speed in big file transfers for longer than the old one. So Samsung's switch wasn't as bad as AData's, it was more like a sidegrade, but it was still scummy to not notify us with a product name/code change.
"trusted brands kingston, pny, adata" well I guess they aren't trusted brands anymore. My current nvme ssd is an adata drive I got in summer 2019, its the last thing ill ever buy from them even though the drive has performed fine for me.
Reminds me of when Sabrent released really fast NVMe drives to get positive reviews, and the price of $250 for 2TB was insane at the time. Then they silently swapped in half speed drives under the same serial number, taking advantage of the positive reviews for the "same product."
This is why we should have reviews "3 month later" where channels like LTT and others buy the products, test it and return. Something like secret buyer. Cause companies are gonna give them the best of their stock to test and later ship crap to actual customers.
I was involved with PC building from the 80's, and I have probably seen every component manufacturer pull off something like this. I did QC and built systems for review using golden samples and setups that just weren't practical in production. My walls were covers in magazine awards for for something you really couldn't buy.
Yeah, i had 5 1.5TB green's fail and another one had abysmal performance where it would soon fail. Switched to Seagate drives after that and purchased 4x4TB spares in ~2014. No seagate drives have failed so still have 4 spare drives lol. I don't like mixing revisions and models in raid arrays so I have to guess how many will fail over the life of the array and buy spares accordingly. PS. the green's had TLER mode enabled :).
@@nitehawk9270 I've never had a western digital drive, only stuck to Seagate for HDDs, and have a Sabrent SSD. Seagate drives do seem quite consistent and reliable, also fast enough to game on even in 2021.
Why on earth would you use WD green, that line has the worst performance of any of their drives Stick to blue or black, the price difference isn’t that huge
@@ryanwallace983 Price of course!. Had raid 1 blue or black i think it was for the OS drives. Performance does not matter when the limiting factor is a 1gbit network interface. The difference between green and black or enterprise drives was more than $200 per drive at the time hence firmware modification.
AFAIK Kinston has been doing things like this since forever with their SSD's. I'd never use one of their drives if I needed performance simply because you don't know what you get. PNY and A-Data is in the same boat. I've used very few Seagate or WD SSDs, but you would hope they wouldn't stoop to things like this, but then there was that shingle disaster with the WD HDD's so now I can't say I really trust WD not to pull a fast one. And Seagate has a very checkered past with how they handle product problems... Samsung and Intel seems reliable so far. They've had some problem products but have AFAIK fixed those within reasonable time. Corsair I can't really say much about. I've used some and never had a problem, but less than ten means nothing and less than a hundred almost nothing, so... Never once used a Crucial SSD but I've never heard anything bad about them so I guess they probably are safe. Maxtor? Seagate bought Maxtor back in 2006 and basically put the brand to sleep. Now they've revived the brand and are selling SATA SSD's and external USB hard drives. Currently it seems they have one model of SSD that's available in three sizes. Are they any good? Who knows. What I wonder is why Seagate feel it's a good idea to bring out a zombie brand when they are already well known in the drive business. Gigabyte? Who knows? Patriot and Silicon Power are two more companies whos products I haven't worked with. If I really wanted or needed guaranteed performance and reliability I wouldn't go with them. As for price/performance, heck yea, but then Corsair, Crucial, Kingston, PNY and A-Data would also be in the run.
@asdrubale bisanzio go away, your false information is unwanted here. It's well known nearly all Seagate drive models have around a 2.5% failure rate in bulk at most.
This is something manufacturers are doing though. Nevermind I re read what you said you were just going off on a tangent after Linus mentioned Newegg being reputable.
@@wannabegamer9902 Yes they would. The hardware is labeled as being built with X components, but suddenly its built with Y components. Advertised product is not the same as the end product, nomatter if the function of the product is the same. Kind of like if a company advertise a bycicle and the picture shows one that is made out of metal, but then you recieve one thats made out of wood. Its and extreme example, but its the same case.
As an owner of those drives, I feel cheated. There's a reason why I read reviews before purchasing a product and I should be able to trust the reviews to be what I get.
Indeed. I want to buy a new item so I read/watch the reviews, and I rely on the accuracy of the information to make an informed purchase. It's not always about which product is the best one because sometimes I just want the most cost effective, but even that goes out the window if the spec has been changed between review and purchase.
@@maximada2003 the mods posted a tool on ltt forum which you can use to check which one you got. Both of mine are Version B from the video but one is using Samsung DRAM the other Nanya. I got them about a year apart from each other.
Samsung doesn't change components? Lots of laughs. Now even Samsung does this! At 970 Plus controller was swapped, later they started using QLC MLC chips instead SLC or TLC, and this continues to this day.
Gee, it's almost like every hardware revision should have a unique product SKU and spec sheet and to do anything less would be deceptive practices and therefore illegal. But a concept that simple is just too difficult to do. I guess.
It's not an issue if the new revision has equivalent or better specs than the original product. This happens allover the place with almost any kind of product, not just in IT. (Automotive sector is a good example) But when you change an important product specification for the worse, you need to disclose it by changing the SKU. TP-Link is a good example of this: They might have five different versions of the same switch and newer versions might not always be better. But it's labeled in the specs sheet and it's clearly marked on the box what revision you are buying.
@@VTOLfreak I think it is an issue too. It still turns buying process to lottery, just slightly different. Like, should I buy X and hope I won't get inferior old revision or should I buy Y which is more expensive, but guaranteed to be good. It's still a lottery, but with a bit higher winning probability
@@dsvechnikov yeah I hate sifting through Amazon comments hoping people are getting shipped v2 manufactured after xx/xx/xxxx. Then hoping that's the one the seller decides to send me too.
I imagine how many brands send emails to LTT to not "review" some product or change their editorial practices like they did to Hardware Unboxed. Still, it is fair to assume they do not even dare to do that since Linus do not take any shit. Go Linus!👍
That's the reason we need well known reviewers, companies will bully small scale ones into good reviews. Same is true for literally every product or service you can buy.
Not at all true. He is one of the biggest commercial sellouts on the tube man! He just dont work in everones favor. Probably only the highest bidders. Youre beeing quite gullable 🤦🏼♂️😂
Proud that I take my time scouring the internet for reviews (especially reputable ones) before buying any product. My friends who ask me for advice sometimes get annoyed because I often nudge them to buy products that we consider as "bang for the buck", and I get frustrated sometimes but I always assure them that it is worth it to wait and choose the right product rather than suffer the consequences.
If they list the details of their tests for the spec and are forced to give you your money back if yours is below spec then you wouldn't even need 3rd party verification, you could just do it yourself.
Or your could just be swimming at 2 miles per hour... you said "up to" not "reach". *is it under water? because freefalling in the air is not really swimming
i don't think so... the marketing/pr people of those companies have worded everything with exactly stuff like this in mind. and i get why... even if you don't want to scam people you still don't wanna get sued for a batch of not ideal chips or whatever
unless theres clear evidence that these companies are doing this with the intention of committing fraud, a class action suit will b fruitless. atm, these companies have just enough plausible denialbility that they can claim that this was by 'accident'
I just purchased a 2tb 970 Evo plus. Although I'm writing data over Thunderbolt 2, Samsung software is claiming speeds around 800 mb/s but Windows is only copying files at around 85 mb/s. I'm troubled by this
Recently bought a WD Black. Was having issues with some games. I was wondering why I was only getting 120fps in FFXIV with a 3070- on low, medium high settings. I got the same FPS basically on my old 1070. Did I wasn't $1000? On a 3070 scalped? Didn't matter. I thought I was cpu bound, but cpu usage was basically nothing. My friend suggested I should try installing it on another ssd. They were both nvme, and the same size; I switched to the newer Corsair MP600 I got. Holy shit. Literally +200 FPS instantly. It was actually so stupid. Like, wtf? That WD wasn't that old at all, not even a year. Not that many drive cycles. I might have to get it returned. Absolutely absurd. I had NO idea it could matter THAT MUCH. wtf. also why did the algorithm dredge up this old video
For me, this is the exact reason why channels like this exist. Not to just promote products I'm interested in, but to also expose the shady side of the industry as well. This kind of reporting builds trust.
The articles from Tom's hardware were the exact reason that for my build I avoided those companies and for my main drive I bought a Samsung 980. For my storage drive it was down to Team and Mushkin based on price and got a Mushkin Helix on sale. In the end I'm quite happy with my setup and I owe it to the news and review sites/channels for steering me in the right direction.
@@jungtarcph That's why I have the 980 as my main drive. My storage drive is just for infrequently accessed or things that I don't want cluttering up my main drive. Anything that important or that I need quickly accessed is stored on my main drive.
I was involved with PC building from the 80's, and I have probably seen every component manufacturer pull off something like this. I did QC and built systems for review using golden samples and setups that just weren't practical in production. My walls were covers in magazine awards for for something you really couldn't buy.
This should be absolutely illegal for any company to do. Advertisements "up to" should mean "actually attainable speed" not "i got lucky on the exact hardware i got"... I am buying a piece of hardware so up to should be how it works under perfect conditions that can realistically be set up... Not a made up number.
"Trusted brands like Kingston." Give me a break. Kingston did this shit with their SSDNow V300's 7 years ago and y'all have used them in countless of your builds since then. They swapped synchronous nand for asynchronous after the reviews came out. The async ones were as slow as my HDD. Returned it for Samsung and have bought from them ever since.
I was actually considering wether I should buy a v300 right around when the bait and switch story came out. I bought a crucial drive instead and to this day the only drive manufacturers i'll consider buying a drive from are those that produce their own nand (or are at least owned by a company that manufactures nand). I'd still buy kingston ram as they have great warranty and i've never had problems with their ram, but I've learned my lesson regarding hard drives.
False advertising at least, counterfeit products at best. Either way, that can be a big headache for any pertaining in such activity in a lot of countries already
Work for a computer assembly company in the states, when you choose a model on amazon and change the storage or ram they send it to the company I work for. They have us changing out things like WD blacks and similar high end SSD with literal no name or brand SSD's. The failure rate on these parts are insane.
GN actually made an update video on that. NZXT later changed the high quality replacement riser that they sent to GN and maybe a couple of lucky customers. The new replacement is almost as shitty as the original fire hazard cable.
We Chinese knew this for a long time. Ever since the Kingston (we called it 渣士顿 ever since then. its a chinese pun, something like Trashton) situation, their brand name is gone.since the variants won't be that bad so people kinda don't care. And most of us usually buy Samsung Or whoever has cheap option. Changing nand happens so often
@@mandowarrior123 people keep buying made in china cuz they broke. yall fully aware whats coming with it but you just cant stop. chinese products never finds difficulty in selling.
to be fair, iirc that drive was a least as good, if not slightly better in every way, honestly in that case they probably didn't have to tell anyone, but I think it may have helped them maintain their ASP as the non-"PLUS" drives dropped in price.
I was really choked with Corsair when they moved their AX line from Seasonic to CWT... It absolutely wasn't the same product and we wouldn't even have known if not for a few online sites.
interestingly enough im noticing this with the headphones i recently bought too, i have the og hyperx sond cloud IIs. its not audiophile levels of sound but its the first pair i had that didnt sound like i was listening to muffled base traps. The one plastic piece on it started to crack, which is what holds the headband on so i sought out to buy another pair since it's still listed after 8 years of having this pair. Bought it off amazon and noticed right away that the quality is much worse, the cable that connects the cups sound together is much thinner, the feel of it is much more plain, the sound is honestly close, but still more muffled. i ended up sending it back to buy it locally and it ended up being the same so i just harvested it for parts to fix my old pair (the part that broke ended up being close enough that it was usable). Honestly it makes me sad that we can't have nice things due to companies trying to sell us cheaply made items for exorbant prices, just got to go small company i guess. 😑
they're very cheap in international regions; I live in Mexico and this SSD cost me half a Samsung one would've cost me or a WD Black of the same storage and specs for about 90% the same performance. ADATA doesn't go down because they adjust prices internationally.
last I remember false advertising was illegal and you could be sued for falsifying specs, but I guess that was when people would sue companies for this
Right but it's the small companies that fucked up in this story and the biggest Samsung that is still giving you what you pay for so not sure how that qoute holds up.
It's like ISP's in my country can advertise high speed internet at up to 10mbps while the government legally recognizes 256kbps as the minimum threshold for high speed internet, meaning sub mbps speed complaints are not considered issues.
I am glad people like Linus expose these scummy practices. One thing I always think of, is the capacity of hard drives. That may say 6 TB for example. And turn out to be 5.56 TB. And the more drives I buy, the bigger the discrepancy seems to be as time goes on. Or a SD card. That claims to be 128 GB. And you get it, and it actually is 117 GB. The discrepancies seem to have no over-site. And there is no consistent standard. Even this IPad I am typing on (which I have 4 of the exact same spec’d IPad), has a different amount of storage than the other three. All four are claiming to be 128 GB. And range between as low as 114GB. Up to 126 GB. NONE of them actually meet the so called 128 GB spec. Yet some are nearly 10% lower than advertised. Well, the larger the drives get, the bigger this discrepancy gets, percentage wise in some cases. I for one have always been bugged there is no industry wide maximum discrepancy. Like say anything over a 5% difference under claimed spec should be REJECTED! It is us end users who get screwed. 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
@@jurgmanx4644 Samsung does the same with their genuine microSDHC cards, there is at least one: their EVO Plus MB-MC128HA don't reach advertised speeds, 85/35 vs advertised 100/60.
@@rawdez_ I have a usb 3.0 sd reader that just barely gets to 100, my new reader can read much faster and isn't the bottleneck. I just got another sandisk extreme and will test it soon. I picked up a pny sd and it runs very close to spec, with my new reader.
I actually don't care... His ads are manageable and much better than RU-vid ads. Of course, being a RU-vid Premium user from at least 2 years I don't even remember how they feel.
@@shiskeyoffles Oh, well, that's pretty smart. You know what's even smarter? Adblock. It's free, and works for more than just RU-vid. Here's an elementary fact for you, Sherlock. Intelligence decreases in inverse proportion to money supply.
I purchased a Kingston V400 SSD years ago, it was good. When my wife built her PC a year later, she too got a Kingston V400 SSD of the same size. It is remarkably slower compared with the older one. Did some searching, and other people had noticed it. It was almost 50% slower than the original V400. Needless to say, I do not buy anything from Kingston anymore.
That's an old carpet sales trick! They sell you "Mohawk" or and other top brand on the store, then when the installer shows up with a roll of carpet and padding, neither one are actually what you bought!!! And not one home owner catches it!!!!
"We cant make new SKU/models everytime we change a component, Linus! It'll cost us 0,000001 cents per drive to change the label on the sticker! We will go bankrupt if we do this!!!"
Fun fact. They already do change the label. EAN, aka the barcode on each product must be unique to specific product and MUST change every time any detail is changed. So if they changed components inside without changing the barcode, they are breaking the law.
@@hubertnnn aren't they already breaking the law by simply selling you a different product almost every time you buy it, while marketing it as something completely different?...
@@danielkoontz6732 you answer is the winner. PNY will get away with it because of the up to statement and the change of component is a change to similar part and does not function as a totally different product altogether. for this reason PNY will have no LAW CASE AWAITING THEM. but a class action filled could force then to specify to the audience the change in part and it affect of performance but that is about it. and even that will not get them in trouble they are sitting a grey area that the LAW affect them. but in a class action if there is a drastic and noticeable difference in performance. i.e more than 50% i believe that is when it will certainly bite them in the ass. in the UK ofcom has force ISP to state to there customers that they can guarantee no less than a 50% performance. letting them know the minimum they can see and the max they are going to get. this should be applied to manufacturing but this will only work through a class action I believe.
@@hubertnnn Thats not true in the slightest. I have sold tons of different skus of products (not tech related but still) that all fall under the same exact barcode. (usually toys)
Only thing is that if they deliberately underdeliver they might still get sued for false advertising. That is the point where expectations are set and not fulfilled.
@@HappyBeezerStudios All they'd need to do is have enough people out there achieving close to the "promised" speeds; Adata technically delivered in their first generation prior to changing out components; by leaving it all the same SKU/model, they maintain that "promise" in that SOME have achieved close to the promised specs.
My tiny 4-cyl Kia Rio has a top speed of up to the speed of light. No matter what you do to it, it's not going to get any faster. Even converting it entirely to energy is only going to get it to go its top speed. Any specification that has "up to" is useless and should not be allowed to be advertised. Make it "at least" and also provide a typical value for some specified conditions (bonus points if you can make those conditions a standard that everyone uses, allowing for easier 1-to-1 comparisons).
