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How Not to Buy a SSD

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Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#71

Post by alfiedotwtf »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #63
moepstar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even sold by Amazon Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket? I went from spending > 10k€ per year to less than 5%, probably not even that, on there, all by their own fault. And i see no reason to buy there anymore: - the defau…

> Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket? For me, it's just physical books, basically. Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.

See my comment above lol :)

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#72

Post by justsomehnguy »

bullen wrote: post #66

The best SSD purchases of my life was the last Intel X-25E (64GB 45nm SLC with 100.000 writes per bit from 2011) I found on ebay ~2021. I ordered one first expecting it to be used or fake, but the packaging looked good (original and untampered) and the Intel disk software said it had only factory number of read/writes so I went all in and bought all the disks they had... 30x at $100 instead of the original $1.000 pri…

> I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".

More like "How to spend $3k and think you did something".

For this amount what you spent you could get any, literally any SSD, use only 64Gb and be fine for decades. Or use more than 64Gb and be fine for... decades anyway.

You literally could buy a server class mixed workload SATA drive with a DWPD of 4.

https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d3/s4620.html

And quite amusingly, any modern SATA SSD runs at the top of SATA3/SATA600 specs, with ~500MB/s for read and write:

    Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Read (up to): 550 MB/s
    Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Write (up to): 500 MB/s
    Random Read (100% Span): 85000 IOPS
    Random Write (100% Span): 48000 IOPS
While Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive is SATA2/SATA300 and runs at 250MB/s at reading:

    Sustained sequential read: up to 250 MB/s
    Sustained sequential write: up to 170 MB/s
    Random 4 KB reads: >35,000 IOPS
    Random 4 KB writes: >3,300 IOPS
https://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/ssd/pdfs/Extreme-SA...

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#73

Post by bullen »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #72
bullen wrote: post #66

The best SSD purchases of my life was the last Intel X-25E (64GB 45nm SLC with 100.000 writes per bit from 2011) I found on ebay ~2021. I ordered one first expecting it to be used or fake, but the packaging looked good (original and untampered) and the Intel disk software said it had only factory number of read/writes so I went all in and bought all the disks they had... 30x at $100 instead of the original $1.000 pri…

> I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD". More like "How to spend $3k and think you did something". For this amount what you spent you could get any, literally any SSD, use only 64Gb and be fine for decades. Or use more than 64Gb and be fine for... decades anyway. You literally could buy a server class mixed workload SATA drive with a DWPD of 4 . https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d3/s46…

You would think that, but I also have Samsungs industrial 3.5TB drives and they are flaky at best.

Eternal growth does not exist, SSDs peaked in 2011 for durability without complexity.

Just like DDR3 has the lowest CAS latency with ok bandwidth and longevity.

DDR4 actually breaks after 10 years.

DDR2 probably lasts more than 100 years.

Think about that, any device manufactured in the coming 50 years will be outlived by 32-bit Raspberry 2!

You just need a bunch of older SD cards and distributed storage so that you don't loose data.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#74

Post by Cervisia »

lelele wrote: post #59
crinkly wrote: post #13

I 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.

The sellers usually do not write "enterprise" in the offer. You have to know the model numbers (for example, the SK Hynix Platinum P41 is the same as the Solidigm P44 Pro and the SK Hynix PC801).

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#75

Post by jmclnx »

PeterStuer wrote: post #62

At the start of the eCommerce business, people flocked to Amazon because they had trouble trusting smaller retailers. These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon). So now I shop…

Same here, got burned from Amazon a HDD with broken pieces, luckily I got a refund. I vowed never to by tech items from Amazon again, you do not really know if you are getting new or some kind of refurbished item.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#76

Post by Havoc »

PeterStuer wrote: post #62

At the start of the eCommerce business, people flocked to Amazon because they had trouble trusting smaller retailers. These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon). So now I shop…

Worth pointing out that Amazon is mixed. Not everything is pooled. You can look at the "Dispatches from" field to tell whether its FBA or not

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#77

Post by dotancohen »

splitbrain wrote: post #60

I 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.

What do you store on them? What is your backup policy?

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#78

Post by splitbrain »

dotancohen wrote: post #77
splitbrain wrote: post #60

I 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.

What do you store on them? What is your backup policy?

I built a NAS off them. They're in a ZFS mirror and important stuff is backed up offsite.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#79

Post by tux »

This also happens a lot on AliExpress most storage devices are fake. Some 64gb flash drives, sd cards or 320gb 2.5 mobile hdds are okay. But you should run f3 test on any new drive you buy.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#80

Post by YeahThisIsMe »

Havoc wrote: post #76
PeterStuer wrote: post #62

At the start of the eCommerce business, people flocked to Amazon because they had trouble trusting smaller retailers. These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon). So now I shop…

Worth pointing out that Amazon is mixed. Not everything is pooled. You can look at the "Dispatches from" field to tell whether its FBA or not

The one that only tells you whether it's shipped by Amazon (pooled) or directly from the seller?
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