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Disk Prices on Amazon

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Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#191

Post by ryanmercer »

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…

About the only thing I buy from Amazon now is books (physical used, digital new) and devices made by Amazon (a new flagship kindle every 2-2.5 years as the PPI and other hardware features get better).

Anything food/supplement related always has reviews mentioning mold, substitutions etc. Cables and electronics are often counterfeit or of questionable quality. I've seen threads here on HN about counterfeit new books. Just not worth the headache of trying to find something that you think is legit and then hoping that co-mingled products alleged to be that don't get shipped to you instead.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#192

Post by Kaiyou »

zaphod12 wrote: post #178
Kaiyou wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust. If something happens, I know amazon got my back. Unless they betray my trust, I will continue shopping on amazon.

Funny timing - this s theVerge's headline story: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-l... Sometimes waiting too long for your personal trust to be broken (after seeing them drop on others) can be a lot worse than just a broken toy.

It's a story about a hairdryer going awry four years after it was bought. This isn't something I would even bother amazon with, it's on the manufacturer. If it was within the first year I'd expect amazon to get me a new hairdryer and that's about it.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#193

Post by kbenson »

etherael wrote: post #189
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…

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 wa…

If it's a Ryzen Pro, it has dedicated encryption/decryption hardware which might be being used. The old Via mini-itx systems had this, which allowed them to speed up AES operation massively, to the point that it was basically free to run an encrypted FS (and in their cases, it definitely had a CPU cost, around 10-20% of their single core IIRC, but that was a decade ago, and I'm not sure I could find the blog entry that person did now).

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#194

Post by etherael »

kbenson wrote: post #193
etherael wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

If it's a Ryzen Pro, it has dedicated encryption/decryption hardware which might be being used. The old Via mini-itx systems had this, which allowed them to speed up AES operation massively, to the point that it was basically free to run an encrypted FS (and in their cases, it definitely had a CPU cost, around 10-20% of their single core IIRC, but that was a decade ago, and I'm not sure I could find the blog entry th…

Brief search on Ryzen pro seems to imply it's some kind of mobile integrated graphics / cpu solution? I don't think the Ryzen 7 2700 is one of those as it's just a plain old am4 desktop board CPU of the ryzen2+ generation, that said, it does have AES hardware encryption support in the instruction set according to https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_7/2700#Features so that may well be what's going on with the seeming complete lack of overhead there.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#195

Post by boring_twenties »

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.

> NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives.

Be very careful even buying new drives from party vendors on Newegg. I've gotten quite a few that were advertised as new but report over 30,000 hours of power-on time.

It turns out my experience is far from unique. Basically, very few people will check the SMART data, so the vast majority of the reviews are fine. If you do happen to catch it, Newegg will of course ultimately step in and force the vendor to fix it -- but that's about it. The first vendor that scammed me appears to still be doing brisk business on the site over a year later, with mostly 4 and 5 star reviews.

Don't buy from https://www.newegg.com/TEKDEALZ to start with.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#196

Post by fulldecent2 »

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…

The solution is Amazon Transparency. This is offered through their Brand Services division.

And the solution for the whole industry is the same thing with some distributed ledger or some very light centralized authority (like MAC or UPC vendor assignments) plus vendor-specific databases.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#197

Post by dehrmann »

toast0 wrote: post #119
dehrmann wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they're going to get in trouble for it (and Amazon Choice) because it implies they're the ones doing the work.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#198

Post by boring_twenties »

jraby3 wrote: post #34
jldugger wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, I suspect newegg reviews are equally gamed. Fundamentally, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that product reviews are worth the price the consumer paid for them: typically zero.

At least there’s no counterfeit products.

There are near-death drives being sold as new by third-party sellers on Newegg and all they'll do is step in and fix your order if you complain.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#199

Post by blairanderson »

fulldecent2 wrote: post #196
cnst wrote: 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…

The solution is Amazon Transparency. This is offered through their Brand Services division. And the solution for the whole industry is the same thing with some distributed ledger or some very light centralized authority (like MAC or UPC vendor assignments) plus vendor-specific databases.

Transparency should be FREE if its the only solution. It really should become a protocol and not Amazon-specific so that other vendors can jump on board. Right now nobody wants to do this unless the majority of their sales are Amazon.

Also, Amazon charges $0.05/UNIT for this!

Source: I am a consultant for Amazon Suppliers. The problem is not as bad as OC exclaims, but its slightly annoying.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#200

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

ody4242 wrote: post #172
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> so on servers you are limited to HyperV you are limited to HyperV, Xen, KVM or insert your favorite hypervisor except for ESXi

Let me know when they approach VMWare’s market share, texture, third party acceptance, and support. I’ll switch all our servers over right away.
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