User reviews useless compared to tech reviews, eg. Western Digital SN350

MANY people base their purchase decision on ‘consumer’s’ opinions, where in reality there is zero way of knowing whether or not they are fake.

The mainstream media jumps on this as well, using this as a huge promotional point, in their click bait advertising model.

One of the worst places an electronics ‘consumer’ could go for advice is to a mainstream media ‘news’ site, for example Rupert Murdoch’s ‘news’ empire from some tech flog using a pseudonym, trying to convince you that Apple’s newest features are worthy of your attention or most importantly your hard earned dollars, in these times of government created austerity.

Even a website’s so called reviews on a particular piece of electronics equipment would not be the best place for reference.

They could be false, they could be bots or even the company's webmaster faking reviews on the orders of the CEO.

In this instance the under the spotlight is a SSD (Sold State Drive) from WD (Western Digital), in particular the SN350 model range.

From the reviews of a tech warehouse one would be of the belief that this is a great product to purchase.

Even from another tech warehouse that touts itself as "Australia's Largest Online Tech Retailer" the technobable they give you sounds impressive:

Well, that's all fine and Dandy, but you (the 'consumer') are missing some vital pieces of information about the product, that being its longevity which is typically given to you in the form of acronyms that being MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures, in hours) and TBW (Tera Bytes Written, in the unit explained).

SSDs failure rate is in the millions of hours, where the WD Green is rated at 1,000,000 hours.

A drive with a 1,000,000 MTBF will equate to being switched on 24 hrs per day for 41,666 days or 114 years of continuous use.

If one was to argue that the drive would be used for only 8 hours per day, then the duration would theoretically quadripple  to over 456 years, where that is yet to be proven.

While this may sound like an eternity ore more like 18.25 (human life) generations, this is by far the lowest in the industry, where 1.5 - 2.0 million hours are more prevalent or acceptable.

Another measure of longevity or 'wear factor' is the Terabytes written figure.

In the above screen capture that all important figure is missing, where one would have to go out of one's way in order to obtain Western Digital's Product Brief to check out the rest of the important specifications, eg:

One company though went to a bit more effort giving the Australian consumer more disclosure as seen in their product advertisement:

WD offers 100TBW on its 1TB drive or approximately on sixth of the industry standard.

It also offers only 3 years warranty instead of a more acceptable 5 years.

Irrespective of your use case, quite simply put this is a drive one should stay away from!

On a side note, WD decided to forgo the industry standard acronym of MTBF to MTTF.

See screen capture from a credible tech review site, ServeTheHome:

Where the full review can be seen here:

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-green-sn350-1tb-nvme-ssd-review/

 

Or another in depth review by Linus Sebastian:

Will colony's law makers tighten the screws on manufactures / advertisers ripping Aussies off?

After all this IS in the 'public interest'.