Disk Prices on Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#201

Post by blairanderson » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

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…

Once there are any customer-complaints on a given SKU then co-mingling is deactivated.

Later, sellers attempting to co-mingle inventory are provided a seller-specific SKU that is matched to the parent and they're required to use. This ties all issues on their orders back to their store.

This still requires lots of human intervention, which sucks.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#202

Post by kbenson » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #200

ody4242 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Xen/KVM market share probably dwarfs VMware if you look at total systems. It's what a lot of the large cloud providers use (AWS/GCE at least). I assume Azure uses HyperV, and also that a lot of shops are using it because it's the supported MS product. Our company has VMware and HyperV deployments for just that reason (Office IT has their own MS cluster, systems uses a VMware cluster we admin. Yes, it's silly, but does illustrate a point).

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#203

Post by cardiffspaceman » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #55

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.

Drives for the wrong region? What is that?

Gray market: The short version is that the exact model that was purchased was intended for a different region due to price segmentation at the manufacturer/brand. The item would be genuine but the manufacturer won't support the item if the customer is outside the intended region.

DVD/BluRay implement a lot of the distribution layer of segmentation in hardware and software, but the notion exists in lots of goods, such as in the marketing of high-end watches to different countries.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#204

Post by RobRivera » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

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…

Do you have a recommended vendor? Last time i bought anything was prior to Newegg doing its marketplace change permitting 3rd party vendors.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#205

Post by hatsubai » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

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.

I believe this issue is only for certain NAS devices, or maybe only certain versions of the drives. For reference, my Synology DS2015xs didn't require any modifications to the four 10TB WD EasyStore drives I shucked that I grabbed from BestBuy.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#206

Post by mthoms » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

mcbits wrote: post #102

jjeaff wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

That seems to be what PCPartPicker is doing to remain compliant. Example:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/MwW9TW/western-digital-inte...

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#207

Post by Havoc » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

winrid wrote: post #122

Havoc wrote: post #113

More interested in the tech behind the website. Amazon traditionally blocks scrapping quite aggressively

Well, it's not a lot of links. Few hundred maybe. I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice. Hard to parse the page still, maybe.

>I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice.

I got blocked on very first attempt to scrap from cloud. Literally request #1.

...with code that worked fine on residential IP five mins earlier (where I coded it).

I'm sure it can be circumvented, but that experience led me to believe it's better to just save the time and pay for a res proxy (as sketchy as that concept is)

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#208

Post by MayeulC » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #147

dmos62 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audit-based security is ok, but the ideal solution is open hardware and firmware.

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.

Add to that:

"I designed it" (and was checked)

"I built it myself"

Which is actually cumulative with what you wrote. We currently have a bit of a "trusting trust" issue with open hardware: how do you check that the fab didn't tamper with your ICs before manufacturing them?

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#209

Post by lvs » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

kcanini wrote: post #15

lvs wrote: post #7

I wish the entire web looked like this once again. Ah the good ol' days. Please add Newegg and other non-Amazon vendors. Newegg has an API and everything. Around 10 - 15 years ago, I used to use a simple site called pricewatch that wasn't too far off from this.

Pricewatch still exists!

Really? pricewatch.com times out for me at the moment.

Re: Disk Prices on Amazon

#210

Post by MayeulC » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

hatsubai wrote: post #205

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.

I believe this issue is only for certain NAS devices, or maybe only certain versions of the drives. For reference, my Synology DS2015xs didn't require any modifications to the four 10TB WD EasyStore drives I shucked that I grabbed from BestBuy.

It happens when drives are compliant with SATA 3.3+, but not the power cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#SATA_revision_3.3

> Power Disable feature allows for remote power cycling of SATA drives and a Rebuild Assist function that speeds up the rebuild process to help ease maintenance in the data center.

> The new Power Disable feature (similar to the SAS Power Disable feature) uses Pin 3 of the SATA power connector. Some legacy power supplies that provide 3.3 V power on Pin 3 would force drives with Power Disable feature to get stuck in a hard reset condition preventing them from spinning up. The problem can usually be eliminated by using a simple “Molex to SATA” power adaptor to supply power to these drives.