Even if their stats were totally accurate, it would have made no difference. No one is buying 10,000 of these things based solely on what the vendor reports it can do anyway right? So who cares?

If we were building out a lot of capacity which could use these drives then we would be delinquent in our capacity to not test these personally anyway.

Vendor benchmarks don't translate to reality? Shock horror. If someone gets burned because they accepted vendor fud as gospel without doing their own testing thus ended up with stuff that doesn't work for their application then that's their fault alone.. Once those people are replaced with those who are able to do their jobs then this is just a out of court replacement deal and NDA between legal and vendor like happens all the time anyway.

And besides, no one is buying these anyway.

"If someone gets burned because they accepted vendor fud as gospel without doing their own testing thus ended up with stuff that doesn't work for their application then that's their fault alone" - absolutely not. Most numbers are legally binding, even if under ideal conditions.

"And besides, no one is buying these anyway" - your comments are full of ignorance laden hubris.

I completely agree. The "trust but verify" approach is very balanced and effective. Absolutely nothing to say!

Yet I am able to pinpoint a lot of people in the SMBs that will simply accept the data proposed in the demos (and for many reasons, not because of incompetence).

So yes in my world, but being aware this is not always happening.

Well, they can't really even do that... ignoring that SMBs should be buying storage as appliances instead of building it (it's massively cheaper TCO wise and in such a case the SSD choice is up to emc or netapp or whoever anyway) and assuming theyre in the rabbit hole of building out storage themselves, then youll typically be buying servers from dell or hp or whoever and you bet they've done this testing for you and you will have zero choice of the SSDs that come in your big 36 sff 2Us..

If you're in the position to be buying raw drives like this, then you're doing things above the SMB level and wouldn't be burned by this sort of thing...

At least... I hope..

You are an enabler.