Kingston and PNY have been caught in a bait and switch scandal. I think /r/buildapc should boycott any and all products from both companies to show them this behavior is unacceptable.
If you aren't informed on this issue, you might want to read this article.
Here are some relevant excerpts:
A blog post at Tweaktown details a reader’s unhappy experience with a new PNY Optima drive. This individual bought the drive expecting that it would feature a Silicon Motion controller, only to discover that the drive they purchased had a different firmware version and a different, SandForce-based controller. When Tweaktown inquired as to the situation, PNY sent back the following: “Yes we did ship some Optima SSD’s with SandForce controllers, but only if they meet the minimum advertised performance levels (in most of the benchmark tests, LSI controllers outperform SMI controllers).”
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a disturbing trend from first Kingston, and now PNY. Manufacturers are launching SSDs with one hardware specification, and then quietly changing the hardware configuration after reviews have gone out. The impacts have been somewhat different (more on that in a moment) but in both cases, unhappy customers are loudly complaining that they’ve been cheated, tricked into paying for a drive they otherwise wouldn’t have purchased.
Kingston’s V300 debuted well over a year ago to generally strong reviews [...] This was a budget SSD family with a great price/performance ratio and one of the first budget drives that didn’t have any “Gotcha” in the performance department. At least, it didn’t have any initially — further analysis from websites like Anandtech and Nordichardware demonstrated that at some point, Kingston made the switch from synchronous to asynchronous NAND.
[...] asynchronous NAND is much, much slower than its counterpart.
"What can I do about this?" Let's boycott both companies. Let's show them that the computer hardware community is not to be messed with.
We've known for quite some time that Kingston was engaging in behavior like this. We called them out on their behavior when we found out about it. I don't think we did enough as consumers, honestly, because we're seeing another company pulling the same stunt less than half a year later.
Kingston believes they did nothing wrong and has not issued any sort of admission of fault or apology for their part in deceiving their customers with a tactic that should be illegal if it isn't already. They're hoping to wait until this all blows over too. They think we're going to forget about this.
I don't think we ought to let anyone forget this until we get an apology from these companies. I think we should organize a boycott on r/buildapc
The boycott:
- I am not going to purchase a PNY or Kingston product until an apology or admission of guilt is made by either company. This should also be accompanied by some sort of pledge to not engage in this behavior again. I would encourage you to do the same.
- I am not going to recommend to anyone to buy a product from either company either.
- I think that if you see someone recommending a product here on r/buildapc from either company you should link them to this thread and let them about the dishonest business practices these companies engage in.
r/buildapc has 200k subscribers. This last month we had more than 4 million pageviews. We can put a serious hurt on these companies just by doing our best to make sure neither company gets recommended on here for a while.
Until we stand up and vote with out wallets and our voices on this issue, companies will continue to mess with us. Collective action is the only way to effect any sort of change on the matter.
EDIT:
This blew up in a big way. I was expecting a few hundred upvotes and some good discussion and instead got a few thousand and a witch hunt. There has been a rebuttal thread posted by u/okp11, who believes a boycott of PNY is premature because he doesn't believe the change will affect the performance of the drive. I suggest you read it as well and make a decision for yourself.
My personal opinion if this: I really don't believe performance is the issue here. The issue is that these companies are sending reviewers one product and consumers another. That's dishonest at the core. There is no SSD dealership where we as consumers can go and give each SSD a test drive. We rely on reviews from unbiased websites to make decisions and when a company changes something significant I believe they should issue a new model number and new review samples. Even if it doesn't make any difference at all, especially in light of what Kingston did.
Posted Jun 14, 2014, 12:09 PM UTC · edited