Very cool website! I like the theme picker and the extensive but easily navigable articles and tags.
How Not to Buy a SSD
51–60 of 184 posts
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#52ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011 ) or Samsung ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678 ), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that. Haven't seen that for enterpris…
Is there some software to give these drives a test drive, before putting them in use?
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#53I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay. No one bothers to fake them and they last longer than the consumer ones even if they are a few years old.
I hear this a lot online - buy used enterprise stuff online, it'll be cheaper and lasts long (at least you get your money's worth). But when you start to explore the online market for these used enterprise hardware, you find that nobody really sells it for cheap any more, at a price that makes sense to buy it. For example, if a new enterprise class SSD is $250, you may find a used one for $125. But then, brand new co…
I'm in Europe. It turns up cheap here. You do have to hunt for it but I bag 1.92TB disk for $70 a pop usually. I have 5 already.
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#54ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011 ) or Samsung ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678 ), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that. Haven't seen that for enterpris…
Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money. Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.
How do you spot the fake listings?
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#55ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011 ) or Samsung ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678 ), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that. Haven't seen that for enterpris…
Is there some software to give these drives a test drive, before putting them in use?
Unfortunately the only way I know is destructive, ie attempt a full disk write.
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#56ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011 ) or Samsung ( https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678 ), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that. Haven't seen that for enterpris…
Is there some software to give these drives a test drive, before putting them in use?
Reply to self, another post below mentions this software:
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money. Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.
How do you spot the fake listings?
These ones are fairly obvious as though they adopt the same model name and colouring than the original, they do not show a Samsung or WD brand. I suspect they do that to avoid giving standing to these companies to sue them. If the distributor (ebay) doesn't care, and the buyers are individuals who will not sue, they act pretty much with impunity.
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#58I recently got a new 4TB Seagate drive from the biggest computer/electronics retailers here, it was shipped in the worst way I've ever seen a hard drive shipped. An anti-static bag, inside of one of those slightly padded envelopes you get when you order an Arduino from AliExpress. Naturally, it had a big dent on one of the corners, and it started clicking the moment I plugged it in. It was replaced with a working uni…
What was the name of the retailer?
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#59I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay. No one bothers to fake them and they last longer than the consumer ones even if they are a few years old.
> I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay.
How do you find them, please? Do you just query for "enterprise ssd"? I've just run this search and indeed it returns lots of models from different brands. Thank you.
Re: How Not to Buy a SSD
#60I recently bought two SSDs from Chinese brands I had never heard before. My thinking being that they were reasonably priced (a bit cheaper than name brands but not by much) and that probably no-one would fake no-name brands. Reviews seemed to be mostly genuine as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so far they seem to work fine, we'll see.