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Disk Prices on Amazon

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Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#101

Post by Rapzid »

gregmac wrote: post #99
Rapzid wrote: 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

I will look into it but the 970 Evo I have supposedly has fixes in for a lot of the stuff from a couple years back.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#102

Post by mcbits »

jjeaff wrote: post #90
mcbits wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That appears to be specific to their advertising API, not the affiliate program. The affiliate program policies[0] say:

> if you choose to display prices for any Product on your Site in any “comparison” format (including through the use of any price-comparison tool or engine) together with prices for the same or similar products offered through any web site or other means other than an Amazon Site, you must display both the lowest “new” price and, if we provide it to you, the lowest “used” price at which the Product is available on the Amazon Site.

... which implies that it's not forbidden, but I can't blame someone for not wanting to risk it.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#103

Post by kbenson »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #95
Rapzid wrote: 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,…

Seems like there's enough cores available in most systems you'd want an NVMe system that you probably don't lose much doing software RAID (or pooling, in some more complex FS like ZFS).

I just found some simplistic software RAID benchmarks on Phoronix[1][2], there may be better ones (I would be interested to see how much CPU the software raid processing takes during some of these tests, even if just to confirm to myself it doesn't take much).

1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-...

2: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418...

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#104

Post by cheeze »

paxys wrote: post #37
giancarlostoro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BestBuy will price match Amazon. So getting the real deal sounds better.

You local Best Buy will also probably have 5 hard disks total. The chances of getting exactly what you want (looking at the list in the linked site) is minimal.

Nah, your local Best Buy is the best place to buy shuckable WD drives on sale. You can get 8TB for $120 pretty easily.

I've walked out with 8 drives at once, but they usually have tons of the Elements in stock.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#106

Post by gnicholas »

I see a lot of folks talking about the risk of Amazon commingling and used drives. I buy drives off Amazon, but only external/new. I only uses these drives as backups, and everything is stored on multiple drives (not RAID, they're stored in different places for fire/theft security). I've been doing this for the last 20 years and have rarely had any drive errors (usually it's a partition that goes, but after reformatting it's fine). What I've found is that I outgrow the drive before it dies on me. Once I outgrow a drive, I just buy another that is twice the size and copy everything over from the old drive, which I hang onto but never use.

But I wonder, am I doing something wrong here? Or are other people just using drives in different ways (for active files or huge media libraries that they don't want to store redundantly)? I would understand that under those circumstances, failure of a single drive is more catastrophic. I don't mean to be critical here, as I'm far from an expert!

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#107

Post by dehrmann »

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 bought some "Amazon Renewed" WD/HGST 10TB He drives. They came from a sketchy seller that provides a "warranty," but the provided phone number and website didn't match. I think one was used but a different(?) sketchy used HDD seller in another state.

I'm pretty sure there's no real warranty, I have no idea where these drives even came from, I have no trust in "Amazon Renewed," and I have a fear the drives are actually a bit smaller, but run a hacked firmware. But I saved $120 on the pair, so rolling the dice...

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#108

Post by dehrmann »

joshstrange wrote: post #3

If you are trying to build a NAS or similar then my suggestion is go with shucked WD EasyStore externals, you need to either use molex to sata power to bypass the 2.2v issue or tape the pin but they are WD Whites inside and work very well from my experience. I just keep waiting for the 14TB's to fall a little further so I can replace one of my 5TB parity drives with that so I can grow my array.

> tape the pin

Been there, and it's worked well, but I did some research and used kapton tape. It's thin, and designed for use in electrical applications needing resistance.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#109

Post by synack »

Hi, this is my site. Thank you for all of the feedback! I can address a few of the issues you've raised...

Missing some products. This is a known bug in how I'm currently importing product data from Amazon's API. Some products are listed with variations that appear on the same product page but are completely separate products in Amazon's catalog. There's no way to get the API to return all of the variations at once, so I have to perform several subrequests to enumerate those. Currently, that doesn't happen. However, I'm in the process of reworking a lot of the data import code to use the new PA-API 5.0 and am planning to make variations work properly with those changes.

Filter by products sold by Amazon. Initially, diskprices.com was set to filter out products not sold by Amazon, but I received quite a bit of feedback asking me to remove that filter as some of the best deals are from resellers. The new PA-API does have a populated Merchant field for most products, so I may try to expose that.

Display prices including shipping costs. This is addressed in the FAQ (https://diskprices.com/faq.html), but it really comes down to privacy. I'd need you to login with your Amazon account or give me your location in order to compute tax and shipping information and I really don't want the burden of handling PII.

Clicking the Back button does weird things. This is a bug. Whenever you change a filter, a bit of JavaScript updates the URL in your address bar so that you can copy/paste a link to the page you're looking at with the current filters and send it to someone. It appears I'm not capturing the Back event and updating the filters to match the address bar. I'll get this fixed soon.

External SSD category is missing. Up until the last few months, there really weren't many external SSDs for sale on Amazon, but it looks like this is definitely becoming it's own product category, so I'll add it.

Add Amazon.co.jp. Funny story, diskprices.com had support for Amazon Japan when I first launched it, but they suspended my account and sent an email telling me why, written in japanese. Google Translate couldn't make any sense of the email and I'd had some significant data quality issues with the filters, so I decided not to pursue it further. This is the first time somebody's asked for Amazon.co.jp support. I'll look into setting it up again, but Amazon's added some new restrictions on API access across all regions since then, so it's a bit more difficult to get new regions added now.

Account for per-port cost in calculating prices. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I think this feature ends up looking a lot like pcpartpicker, with a constraint solver bolted on the side... Given a set of parameters for total capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, etc, optimize for the best price/performance. I currently don't have enough metadata about most of the drives to implement this properly and it's a big feature to develop, but it's something I want to experiment with eventually.

Again, thank you all for the feedback!

edit: formatting

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#110

Post by concerned_user »

kbenson wrote: post #103
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Seems like there's enough cores available in most systems you'd want an NVMe system that you probably don't lose much doing software RAID (or pooling, in some more complex FS like ZFS). I just found some simplistic software RAID benchmarks on Phoronix[1][2], there may be better ones (I would be interested to see how much CPU the software raid processing takes during some of these tests, even if just to confirm to mys…

Software raid (implemented in os, not the fakeraid/softraid chip on motherboards) in this case is better because it can use as much memory as it needs and also since it is part of the OS it can receive additional information on what kind of workload OS wants from it, i.e. readahead or not and how much. Hardware raid generally doesn't know about those things and tries to infer them so it can't optimize fully.
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