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Disk Prices on Amazon

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Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#91
I just spent a few days looking for server hard drives.

IOPs, NVMe doesn’t RAID, throughput, latency, raid controllers, on hard drive DRAM cache, SAS vs SATA vs M2 vs PCI, drive writes per day, mean time between failure, specific server firmware on drive...

I’d buy anything off this list for me personally, but I’m definitely in research mode and there just isn’t enough info here. Buy on price alone!? Savages!

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#92
post #31

Why is that external drives are often cheaper than internal?

I have thought about this as well. I would love someone more knowledgable to chime in - but if I had to guess it is that consumer hard drive sales have been declining a lot in recent years. Desktops are a thing of the past for your average PC user, and as a result hardware/storage upgrades. Laptops, mobile devices, and cloud storage is where it's at. No one is buying hard drives anymore except large enterprises. In o…

When I shuck drives like these, I frequently find the higher quality models of drives in there. However, I have heard that they bin their drives and the drives that don't pass muster for enterprise end up getting used in these external drives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#94
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What is needed is focus, not "less". Finding and buying computer parts is infinitely easier on Newegg than any B&M site, because that's what Newegg does. They have more computer parts than Amazon, not less, but they sort and filter and organize it much much better. I think Amazon just doesn't care about people who are shopping for items with very exact specificationd in mind. It's an edge case for them. M…

Amazon's goal to be the world's retailer, selling everything , creates an incentive for vendors to appear in as many search results as possible. Even if the payoff is small, it's a net positive. For both Amazon and the shopper, most results subtract from the utility of the experience. The incentives problem is that: - For vendor, more hits == benefit. - For Amazon, irrelevant search == small cost, fix == high effort.…

- For shopper, irrelevant search == high cost, switching retailers == low cost

Is this backward?

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#95
post #81

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…

I can answer this! It has nothing to do with raid controller quality so much as NVMe doesn’t go to a disk controller. It lives on the PCIe bus itself.

In IDE, SATA, SAS, you wire up to RAID. In NVMe, you skip the raid controller.

So you can still RAID, but it’s either software or some device with a “private” bus like those PCIe cards that hold 4 m2 sticks. Or IDK how others work.

I just know for Enterprise right now, you get NVMe -OR- RAID. Sucks because I had some screaming drives picked out super cheap but had to ditch them in favor of slower SAS drives. But... those slower and smaller SAS drives in RAID10 will be faster than the RAID1 NMVe plan I had.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#96
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.

Drives for the wrong region? What is that?

Often the drives are sold at different prices in different regions. For instance, I have a few WD Reds (NAS 24/7 grade) cheaper than Blues (consumer grade). They have the words "Not for sale outside Mainland China" in big bold writing on the label. They are usually parallel or grey market goods, in my case they were brought into Hong Kong by parallel traders who probably brought infant formula or medicine back into mainland China

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#97
post #71
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…

> I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon.

It is cheaper than almost every other computer store in the UK for the same parts, deliver next day and they don't tend to shaft you on delivery cost (if it costs anything at all).

Unless you are near one of the large online shops and need something delivered next day there is no other option than Amazon.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#98
post #81

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…

> 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?

The guys making storage controller ASICs weren't really prepared to start pushing 3M+ IOPS through their entry-level products. If you want to get your money's worth of performance out of NVMe SSDs, you can't have much of an abstraction layer sitting in front of them, especially not one that translates them into SCSI devices. It also doesn't take many drives before the RAID controller's host interface is the bottleneck, because the RAID card can't go into a slot wider than PCIe x16, and most are just x8.

On the other hand, actually using that much storage performance requires a ton of software engineering effort on the application side, and quickly pushes you toward a clustered approach where a traditional RAID controller isn't all that useful. "Software Defined Storage", NVMe over Fabrics, etc. are popular because it's hard to actually keep 24 NVMe SSDs busy with just a 2P 2U server.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#99
post #81

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…

FYI, at this point, hardware-based drive encryption is considered utterly broken and you shouldn't use it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382975

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#100
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a consumer, is there a way to tell when this is the case? It would be nice to filter this way, similar to using "Prime" to filter to just "ships from Amazon warehouse".
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