How are these still on sale?
  • Barry ZuckerkornEnglish
    18•2 years ago

    The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products “sold by Amazon” was a guarantee that there wouldn’t be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.

    Now they don’t police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the “SEO” of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they’re susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.

    It basically makes it so that they’re no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it’s worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.

    • @jarfil@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2•2 years ago

      Enshittification. Applies to Amazon too.

      First they attracted consumers. Then they attracted sellers. Now they’re exploiting both.

      There is a reason why they got brick and mortar shops to close, while sellers with too good of a return policy are going under, and the search feature returns random numbers of items in a random order that have little to do with what you asked it for (the most egregious is “sort by price”, which suddenly makes the product count go down… but you go to camelcamelcamel, and for the same search it stays the same with actual sorting by price).

  • @Moonrise2473@feddit.it
    9•2 years ago

    WD writing fake reviews?

    There’s no way an actual human wrote such an extensive, detailed but overall dry of content as a review, unless they got it for free in exchange of an enthusiastic review

    Edit: the article shows screenshots of clearly fake reviews on Amazon from “verified” buyers. This is what I’m referring to fake reviews

  • @BCsven@lemmy.ca
    3•2 years ago

    SSDs are nice and fast but if the data table goes bad, you have lost everything. At least with a HDD you can still pull files off if filesystem table goes bad. Also unplugged SSD in a hot location will lose data quite readily. Always keep them powered to keep the bits.

    • @Sina@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2•2 years ago

      That’s a bit extreme. Don’t use ‘Extreme PRO Portable SSD’ units, but WD has some pretty reliable SSDs and if we boycott WD only Samsung is left…

    • HarkMahlberg
      0•2 years ago

      The Verge is a hit or miss outfit for me. Sometimes they’re fine, but then you remember when they tried to build a PC and you wonder if they really actually know what they’re doing over there.

    • @that_one_guy@beehaw.org
      0•2 years ago

      It’s basically just a really elaborate angry comment on a SanDisk SSD. Sucks that you lots your data, but it’s a single failure that could happen to basically any drive. Back up what you care about. Absolute waste of time ‘article.’

  • @TempleSquare@lemmy.ml
    1•2 years ago

    That’s good to know. I almost thought of buying a couple (I always back up with pairs) to replace a couple of aging spinning disk portables.

    Guess I will wait.

  • Deceptichum
    0•2 years ago

    What is a good portable HDD to get these days?

    Or should I just get one of those little usb m2 cases.

      • @lloram239@feddit.de
        0•2 years ago

        Cheaper? Internal HDDs have been more expensive than USB ones for the last decade or so. Which is why Hard Drive shucking (i.e. ripping the HDD out of the USB enclosure for internal/NAS use) is such a common sport.