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Disk Prices on Amazon

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Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#111

Post by concerned_user »

hadlock wrote: post #75
cnst wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever tried searching for apps on the Google/Android Play store? It's a complete disaster if you're trying to find something specific that's not in the top 20 apps. Given that Search is Google's specialty my personal conclusion is that search is fundamentally broken on the Play Store on purpose.

There are so many apps released constantly since their only hope is to get into "new apps" lists which lasts probably a week or so, if they don't get enough installs then it is usually the end.

So I guess google just heavily filters, limits and shuffles apps so they are somewhat evenly distributed but it does look to end users like a buggy search that can't decide if it has the app or not returning different results for the same query.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#114

Post by Havoc »

syphilis2 wrote: post #39

Wow, SSD prices bounced back after December. I think most people were (and still are) expecting $100/TB to be the new baseline. https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...

Think that might just be that item. Still looks pretty consistently dropping to me

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#115

Post by Dylan16807 »

whatusername wrote: post #93
LeoPanthera wrote: post #20

See also: "Price per TB" - http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/

Also because I was curious -- looks like LTO-8 is about $12.75 on newegg. Which is still keeping below disk - but only just (and ignores the cost of drives)

It's a pain to format LTO-7 for higher capacity in LTO-8 drives, but once you do it's only $5-$5.50 a TB

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#116

Post by dredmorbius »

anchpop wrote: post #94
dredmorbius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No.

For a shopper, not being able to find what you want (or trust what you find) is a high cost.

The cost of switching to another site, or shopping mode, is low.

More to the point: it's vastly lower than the shopper being able to effectively fix Amazon's search.

This is a general principle of networks and positive- vs. negative-value members or additions.

The naive Metcalf's Law notion, that all members of a network are a net positive, is false, and even the far more useful Tilly-Odlyzko formulation (V = nlog(n)) fails to account for nodes contributing a negative cost. Since all* information imposes an attention cost, you can approximate the actual network value as:

    V = n*log(n) - k*n
Where k is some cost constant.

In fact the size of the network is determined by the cost constant. The lower the constant, the larger the sustainable network size.

At some point, adding more members reduces total network value. Worse, since you have high-value and low-value contributors, and quite possibly a higher value-sensitivity of high-value members, as the network value approaches and passes the zero point, high-value members tend to defect. That's what happens as a social network tends to low-quality posts, content, and discussion.

Or a shopping market tends to counterfeit goods, mislabeled content, fraud and the like.

Just as MySpace found itself walking dead, and numerous earlier retail establishments, Amazon could find itself on the wrong side of this line and quickly.

Also: though I represent k as a constant, it's better to think of it at any given point in time as being mostly undifferentiated amongst nodes. But over time that constant might increase or decrease, whether due to the behaviour of nodes, additions or deletions in nodes, or in environmental factors.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#117

Post by inferiorhuman »

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 forget why I stopped patronizing Central Computer, probably something to do with selection, price, and service. Newegg is an utterly hostile place to buy things these days.

Honestly, if price isn't a motivating factor CDW still exists (and if you're making large business purchases you'll definitely get better pricing).

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#118

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

concerned_user wrote: post #110
kbenson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sort of, I’d have no issue with software RAID. VMWare however has exactly ZERO software raid options so on servers you are limited to HyperV it seems.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#119

Post by toast0 »

dehrmann wrote: post #107
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 actua…

Yeah, I don't know what Amazon Renewed is, but it's not consistent. I bought two renewed phones of the same model a couple weeks apart, and they came with similar but not the same packaging, and one came with a review card from the vendor, even though I bought shipped and sold by Amazon.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#120

Post by MrGilbert »

I find it interesting how stable HDDs are in terms of price.

I just cross-checked with german "Geizhals"[1], and the 4 TB Seagate IronWolf (ST4000VN008) started at ~160€ in Sep. 2016, quickly fell to 140€ a few days later, and then slowly descended to 105€ in Jan. 2018 - and that's the region it's been sitting there for two years now. The UK price chart looks almost the same.[2]

[1]: https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008...

[2]: https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000v...

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