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Disk Prices on Amazon

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Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#81

Post by Rapzid »

Anecdote. I swore off spinning disks for my PC years ago, but I've been a bit cheap and recently got fed up with my 500GB "storage" drive always being near full and my work VM as well :/ So I finally went onto Google to look into storage and was absolutely, postively, shocked that I somehow missed the whole m.2 nvme surge. So much so that I got a 1TB 970 EVO for just $170. Nearly 500k random IOPS with qd32, and 3.5GB/s and 2.5GB/s sequential read/write?! Yes please.

I was even able to jump through hoops to get bitlocker working with hardware encryption, so I'm getting full disk encryption at nearly spec speeds. Awesomeness.

EDIT: It's a shame the situation with RAID controller software, drivers, and physical controllers is such a crap show ATM. Doing anything "enterprise" with them seems a bit of a cluster F ATM. Anyone know what's up with that?

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#82

Post by toast0 »

cnst wrote: post #68
toast0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best I can figure is that Amazon sort by price is using the lowest price from any new offer, even after you've narrowed to a specific seller. It might be some grades of used as well. It's also likely that the prices are periodically refreshed for the index, not live. I don't have any real information though, other than a confirmation that it doesn't do what I want either.

How can a site this large get away with such a basic functionality not working as any of their users would want for such a long time? Did it ever work? I think I've noticed it not working like 5 or 6 years ago when I was shopping for shoes, if not earlier than that. Keep in mind that even without Zappos, they're in the business of selling shoes, too, and have ran some crazy promotions around shoes, too.

I don't know if it ever worked; it's certainly not worked for a long time. I recall thinking that amazon is very good at optimizing things, but their targets are different from mine.

They can get away with it, because we still use them, I guess.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#83

Post by jjeaff »

cnst wrote: post #71
sn wrote: post #32

We stopped buying drives from Amazon when we got drives for "the wrong region" and couldn't RMA them. NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives. Provantage is another reputable vendor that usually has decent prices. If you're local to the SF bay area, check out Central Computers. King Star USA also works if you're a business customer making a large purchase.

I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon. Their Fulfilled-by-Amazon (FBA) idea was quite a game changer, but the implementation with the inventory co-mingling is something that I'd much rather stay away from as a consumer. There's been oh-so-many reports that even if you're buying from the official store of any known brand, with FBA, then you might as well still receive a knock-off, due to the inve…

co-mingling is mostly opt-in, unless that has changed. And I doubt they are co-mingling high dollar products, nor should anyone be dumb enough to do that. You usually only co-mingle to avoid the effort of putting individual sku stickers on each item which makes sense for very low priced items.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#84

Post by jjeaff »

smogcutter wrote: post #45
ReverseCold wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If possible, Micro Center or Frys. Frys is somehow profitable but with dwindling stock at every California/Nevada location I’ve been to recently (maybe an indicator of higher prices?), but Micro Center is great.

There was a big thread about Fry’s a few weeks ago. Apparently the story behind the empty shelves is they’re having contract issues with suppliers.

Ya, contract issues for a very specific reason. They are trying to switch to a full "consignment" model. So they want the manufacturers to give them all the inventory for free and they'll just return what doesn't sell later. So manufacturers are likely very disinterested in that model.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#85

Post by senderista »

catalogia wrote: post #79
OJFord wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's sort just flat out doesn't work, I don't understand it, it's obviously not incompetence (and anyone can call a std lib `sort` fn on a given field anyway) so I don't understand why it's an option, why it pretends that sorting by price is something that you can do. It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) -…

I was at an Amazon all-hands years ago (I haven't worked there for years) and I saw an employee ask Bezos what Amazon was going to do about the poor quality of search. Bezos brushed off the criticism and said the search team did good work. I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.

I was there too when someone asked why Google seemed to always have better search results for Amazon.com than Amazon itself, and I remember he said that if you always start searching on Amazon and only fall back to Google when you don't like Amazon's results, you'll notice when Amazon has poor results and Google has good results, but not the reverse. Something of a copout perhaps, but I thought it was an astute observation.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#86

Post by jjeaff »

rasz wrote: post #4
theamk wrote: post #2

This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the cheapest anyway. If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not just Amazon) second.

While nobody counterfeits mechanical drives, you can still get screwed buying "refurbs"/"tested only, like new" and similar "deals". SMART data can, and is often reset, making 3 year old >30K hour drives pulled from storage racks report mere couple power on counts and less than hour total lifetime run time.

You can also get screwed for "new" drives. It depends on whether Amazon gates "new" sales of hard drives and even then, there are likely people gaming the system to get un-gated to sell them. All it takes is the original box and some shrink wrap to make a refurbished drive "new".

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#87

Post by jjeaff »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #50
climb_stealth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they are lesser quality or worse specs. External hard drives often don't even show the performance characteristics other than capacity on the boxes. This is different for internal drives from what I recall.

It's actually the opposite. External hard drives are frequently made from over production of enterprise grade hard disks. [1] Manufacturers would rather over produce high quality drives than risk not being able to fulfill orders. Eventually the surplus gets put in an external housing and rebranded for consumer use. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easy...

I do a lot of shucking of external hard drives and I have never come across a 7200rpm drive. They are always 5400. But they are sometimes the higher quality drives in that speed range.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#88

Post by senderista »

cnst wrote: post #71
sn wrote: post #32

We stopped buying drives from Amazon when we got drives for "the wrong region" and couldn't RMA them. NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives. Provantage is another reputable vendor that usually has decent prices. If you're local to the SF bay area, check out Central Computers. King Star USA also works if you're a business customer making a large purchase.

I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon. Their Fulfilled-by-Amazon (FBA) idea was quite a game changer, but the implementation with the inventory co-mingling is something that I'd much rather stay away from as a consumer. There's been oh-so-many reports that even if you're buying from the official store of any known brand, with FBA, then you might as well still receive a knock-off, due to the inve…

Official brands with their own store can opt out of commingling. I've confirmed this with a friend who works on the retail side of Amazon.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#90

Post by jjeaff »

mcbits wrote: post #56
xmichael99 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it's against Amazon's API terms to compare with other sites. I recall years ago the guy who runs the site explained that he is only ok to compare Amazon with Amazon.

I don't think it's against the rules, but the rules are complex and spread all over multiple places, and they're like Google in that you have no due process if someone there decides they don't like what you're doing.

It is against the rules. If you are an e-commerce company (i.e. a competitor) or you operate a shopping comparison service, you are not allowed to use the API at all.

https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/api

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