The Marketing Is A LIE
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
997 words · ~4 min read
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truth in advertising
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whether it's the tact on resort fees from your last vegas vacation or that
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photo of the big mac that looks nothing like the burger you'll be eating the
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corporations are always finding new misleading ways to market their products
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and this is no less true in the tech world especially when it comes to ssds
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so sabrint sponsored this video demystifying some of the SSD marketing
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that's out there now don't get me wrong when companies claim that ssds are
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faster than traditional hard drives they are definitely right about that the
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issue is that typically the numbers on the spec sheet or the advertisement from
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the manufacturer while very impressive sounding and big
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in many cases seem to be designed only to make their drive sound incredibly
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fast now in this video we discussed
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which specs to pay the most attention to when shopping for an SSD for example an
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SSD will be able to read or write large
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sequential files something like a space hogging video file more quickly than
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lots of small more random bits of data
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like you would encounter with frequently used programs like web browsers meaning
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that the random performance specs are more relevant to the everyday user than
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the sequential ones but here's the rub there isn't any kind of
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body or industry association that oversees SSD testing and while ssds work
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very differently compared to mechanical hard drives and even compared to each
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other in many cases oftentimes the exact
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same tests are used on hard drives and
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ssds you see most quick and dirty drive
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benchmarks measure how long it takes for a drive to accomplish some task say
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transferring a large file but this kind of work is a lot more
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straightforward for a hard drive because fragmentation aside it can simply
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overwrite whatever space on the platter is marked as free ssds on the other hand
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often need to erase the data first and
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move some existing data before new data can be written to a specific block you
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can learn more about that up here but basically it adds more time to your SSD
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write operations especially if your SSD is getting full and doesn't have as much
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free space to work with and while it might not be difficult to measure how
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long this process takes the issue is that in the real world people aren't
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writing to mostly empty drives which is what many manufacturers use for their
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benchmarks instead as your SSD fills up from daily
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use there's more and more performance overhead due to data reshuffling which
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can cause real world speeds to drop off dramatically far below what's listed on
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the spec sheet then making matters much worse you have
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the fact that the number of random reads in particular that an SSD can do this is
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measured in iops is often reported while
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the SSD isn't also trying to write much data and in the real world there are
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many scenarios where you would be doing both reading and writing at the same
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time meaning that these read iops that are reported on the sheet can easily end
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up inflated throw in the fact that an increasing
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number of ssds employ complex data management and caching algorithms to
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boost drive performance beyond what should be possible with the underlying
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flash memory under certain conditions
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and it can be very unclear exactly what kind of data was used to get the numbers
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that you see when you go to buy a drive on amazon or newegg so then does that
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mean that SSD manufacturers are all evil and going out of their way to lie to you
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well actually probably not it's more likely that because proper SSD
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benchmarking is way more difficult and time consuming than testing a hard drive
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manufacturers simply can't be bothered to develop and run these complicated
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benchmarks versus the quick ones that they do on these mostly empty drives
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because it not only spits out impressive looking numbers that look great on the
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spec sheet but it also saves them time and resources
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and the thing is that so far this is only even bitten a handful of
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manufacturers in the butt because the truth is that many people who buy an SSD
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just want an easy boost in speed and responsiveness compared to their hard
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drive and they may not even care about the exact performance numbers
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but anyway let's say you really are concerned about
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how a drive stacks up before you buy it well for the discerning buyer we've
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linked a couple of websites down below that do more comprehensive drive testing
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using methods that closely simulate real-world workloads and then drawing
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conclusions from that so grab those reading glasses
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and get cracking it takes a bit more effort but this knowledge could come in handy for when
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you need peak performance for all that super critical work you do
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speaking of peak performance check out the rocket NVMe SSD from our sponsor for
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today's video sabrant it uses an m.2
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interface so that means it's super small not taking up pretty much any room in
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your computer and it supports pci express 3.0 gen 4 so it's super fast
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whether you're gaming editing videos or completing projects it also features
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advanced wear leveling to ensure that it'll be snappy and reliable for a long
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time to come and you can check it out today at the link in the video
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description so thanks for watching guys like dislike
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check out our other videos leave a comment if you have suggestions for
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everything as fast as possible why can't you don't put it off that's how you
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forget