[jmiserez]

I think you just expected to much from this article.

This is not a comprehensive guide to testing SSDs, it’s the story of what the author went through when trying to test SSDs. It’s well written and the author seemed to really engage with the topic and describe all the setbacks he had and research they did. I did not think he presented himself as an expert, just a software engineer tasked with upgrading their SSDs. And who knows, maybe this was only a 20% time project.

There are a lot of blog posts on HN that have much less actual content and where the authors have much less of a clue, yet often the response is overwhelmingly positive because someone took the time to write it up. You should really be more charitable here.

And to adress the calls for “outside experts”: If everyone called in outside experts for everything hardware (or software) related, we software engineers would never get to do anything cool or learn some new framework. We’d just be watching an outside expert do their thing. And outside “experts” are not necessarily better, often they might just sell themselves better. And who is going to check their work if the knowledge is all outsourced?

I think it’s great that the BBC lets their engineers do this and learn along the way, and a place where that is possible sounds like a nice place to work. It’s not like they had any downtime or anything because of this.

[wtallis]

> And to adress the calls for “outside experts”:

You completely misinterpreted (and misquoted) me on that one. I wasn't implying that they should hire a consultant for this kind of thing, but they should at least have bothered to read anything about the methodology used by SSD reviewers or the industry standard storage testing methodology freely published by organizations like SNIA. It's clear the BBC guys didn't even spend an afternoon trying to read up on how to evaluate SSD performance; they just jumped in and started re-inventing the wheel, hitting all the foreseeable problems along the way. It looks like they now have a clue and have learned a lot from the process, but this is not how you should handle this kind of upgrade.

[jmiserez]

EDIT: no need to downvote wtallis, he has a valid point!

Sorry I misread and misunderstood that, I did not mean to misquote.

What you’re saying is of course absolutely true, they should have done much more research at the beginning.

However, at the start of a seemingly easy task, research may not be first thing to spring to mind (although it should be).