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Disk Prices on Amazon

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Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#181
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>producing at near zero margin :)) https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin SSDs are unsuitable for long term storage, technology is simply incapable (cells losing charge, normal usage physically degrading medium, limited number or charges per cell). We dont have anything better than spinning magnetic medium at the moment, and nothing viable on the horizon.

> cells losing charge Leave it powered up and let the controller re-write the data every year or so automatically. >normal usage physically degrading medium For 'read-only' data that is rewritten once per year to compensate for cells loosing charge, you can expect a lifetime over 10,000 years. Sure, some SSD's available today wont handle the above cases properly and data will be lost, but it is not a theoretically un…

enterprise class SSDs, our system runs 480 370g and we have had drives flagged within two years. granted we have a heavy processing model but we have never loaded the system beyond 60% so far (it is 90tb mirrored protection). I used to think we would never see a failure compared to other systems we have spinning 15k drives on but alas that is not true.

as to the failure rates being similar, too early to tell, but to be up front the sheer performance gain even compared to heavily cached systems is amazing.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ranking of security: "It's secure because we say so" "It's secure, and we have a published design and audit" "It's open source" "We're offering a reward to anyone who can break it" "Our company would go under if anyone found a flaw in it" SSD's are currently at the first stage.

I'm not sure if I'd put being open source higher than actually being audited. In theory there's no difference between the 2. In practice being open source means that it could be audited while publishing an audit means it was . It's the difference between giving someone money and giving them a lottery ticket for that money. As many programmers admit themselves, it's also their job/duty/etc. to audit open source code b…

True, but this is balanced by the fact many audits miss parts, and at least being opensource means it's quite likely to become the target of automated fuzzers and vulnerability scanning tools.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#183

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.

Yep, I’ve got a few rolls of Kapton tape sitting next to my desk. I haven’t used it yet since I just used the Molex to Sata cables for all my shucked whites.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#184

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. As far as I know it doesn't happen in the UK at all. I have placed 200+ orders with Amazon in last year alone and haven't had any issues except for a couple deliveries which we…

I wonder if this knock-off problem I keep reading about is something specific to the US. I've ordered ~200 things over the last 3 years from Amazon, and I've never received a knock-off either. I've never even heard of that happening outside of internet comments. Plus sending things back to Amazon is usually fairly trivial.

>I've never even heard of that happening outside of internet comments.

Amazon itself has admitted it has a counterfeit problem to it's investors

https://qz.com/1542839/amazon-has-finally-admitted-to-invest...

Beyond that there's been documented cases by manufacturers such as Birkenstock and Apple plus the eclipse sunglasses.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#185
post #69

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.

Isn't that a bit totally though? I've heard that old one: molex to sata lose all your data

I don’t think I’ve heard of this. It’s only the power that the cable is providing and I’ve been running for months if not 1-2 years without issue using this setup.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#186
post #141
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the line they're giving out, anyway. I'm curious to see if it's just a ruse to keep some employees around and keep customers coming in paying full price as they clear the shelves before something else like complete shutdown.

It's weird, the shelves are as empty as you could hope for in a liquidation scenario and there's just crap left. Continuing to pay rent to try get rid of a few hard to sell pieces of old tech or low value items like phone cases is definitely past the point of being sensible. So I think someone in management genuinely believes suppliers will come around to supplying them goods with payment on sale, despite all evidenc…

I suspect they actually own some of their buildings and have for some time, starting from way back when property values and mortgages were lower. Or at least "own" in the usual sense of being the owner of the mortgage. Which would maybe? give them a few months more comfort zone in that they aren't paying that extra margin of current market rents to a landlord, at least in those cases where they own.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#187
post #61
post #48

Setting aside the issue of counterfeits on Amazon, this is really nice. Clear, simple, functional and allows you to explore the space not just comparison shop for a specific item. I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.

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) -…

>it's obviously not incompetence

Have you seen the kindle software? Amazon's programmers are just comically incapable of writing the simplest things.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this knock-off problem I keep reading about is something specific to the US. I've ordered ~200 things over the last 3 years from Amazon, and I've never received a knock-off either. I've never even heard of that happening outside of internet comments. Plus sending things back to Amazon is usually fairly trivial.

How would you know whether what you received was authentic?

For example, one wouldn't know their bike helmet was a knockoff unless they had fallen and hit their head.

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/16/647377213/fake-bike-helmets-c...

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#189

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…

Using https://old.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/eryb71/best_storage_f... setup and truecrypt + zfs raid with lz4 compression I never see cores even visibly affected by either compression or encryption, the speed seems to hit the actual underlying hardware speeds pretty reliably, and this machine CPU is not anything to be amazed about in current year (Ryzen 7 2700 stock clocks with the performance governor)

Actually I was a bit curious about this so just tried reading some raw images off the zfs pool with no directives against caching or anything to hit the absolute maximum possible read speeds, even with the read speeds getting well above 1GB/sec it still wasn't showing any visible impact on any cores in terms of either truecrypt or zfs. Almost wondering if they're hidden somehow at this stage. If they're not though it seems the performance impact is so low it gets nowhere near restricting throughput compared to uncompressed / unencrypted speeds.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#190
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…

> was absolutely, postively, shocked that I somehow missed the whole m.2 nvme surge.

I only stay subscribed to the NewEgg emails to watch retail HDD/SSD prices. The prices always amaze me, I member paying over 100$ for a 32mb usb drive and our first HDD in a home PC was a 200 something megabyte caviar.

It makes me wonder what things will be like in another 25 years.

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