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How Not to Buy a SSD

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Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#81

Post by cm2187 »

Cervisia wrote: post #19
senectus1 wrote: post #2

Had the same issue with a Crucial drive from amazon. looked just like the real thing but for some small discrepancies. Performed like an absolute dog and the SMART data was waaaay off. amazon just refunded me the whole amount and I pulled it apart to see what was inside: https://imgur.com/a/NUSuuEh quite annoying, though also amusing.

There is nothing obviously suspicious with what's inside. The SATA form factor was designed for HDDs; solid-state drives usually are not much larger than a M.2 drive. These flash part numbers look like Intel. This is actually plausible; until 2018, Intel and Micron had a flash partnership. And while their Crucial brand has some good high-end drives, they are also willing to sell absolute bottom-of-the-barrel trash. W…

In fact I opened a failed 3.84TB SAS SSD recently and it looked fairly similar.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#82

Post by cm2187 »

splitbrain wrote: post #78
dotancohen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d try to fill them to 30% to see if they survive before trusting them with my data.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#83

Post by lelele »

Cervisia wrote: post #74
lelele wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Thanks, but how do you know that those are enterprise SSDs? Of the three you've mentioned, only Solidigm P44 Pro's homepage explicitly classifies it as an enterprise SSD.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#85

Post by trenchpilgrim »

dotancohen wrote: post #48
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I began noticing this about seven or eight years ago when the oil filters I bought changed from official ones to obvious counterfeits (certain pieces were missing entirely + media was much thinner than the real ones). Had to switch to a local auto parts supplier to guarantee the correct part.

How did you notice that the media was thinner? On passenger vehicles at least, the filter media is in a stainless steel cup that precludes examination.

It was a suzuki with a paper filter cartridge you load into a metal cylinder that is part of the engine. So you can see and feel the media.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#86

Post by bakugo »

stroebs wrote: post #15

I’d also like to point out that those Kingston A400’s are notoriously terrible and had a firmware bug that caused the behaviour you describe if you don’t update it before it happens. I purchased 10 genuine new from a verified vendor and 6 had to be RMA’d within the first year.

Yep, I have one of these too and the speeds on it are unbearable. It's one of the cheapest "brand name" SSDs you can get for a reason.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#87

Post by Panzer04 »

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…

Are you joking?

You bought 30 64GB SSDs from 2010 in 2021?

You realise 3k buys you much faster, much higher capacity modern SSDs with the same longevity characteristics? Hell, if it really matters there's still some optane floating around, with 100k cycle endurance ratings and much, much better performance.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#88

Post by stavros »

dotancohen wrote: post #49
mook wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, does AliExpress do inventory commingling too? I see that they do seem to have something about managed inventories… because I was originally going to say that things bought from "flagship stores" on AliExpress might be more likely to be authentic, but now I'm unsure.

Cables and chargers I will only buy from the official Ugreen store on AliExpress. They are excellent. All other cables and chargers I've seen on AliExpress on junk firestarters waiting to happen.

I also buy Baseus, though good luck figuring out which of the ten stores is the official one.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#89

Post by Panzer04 »

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…

Assuming pcie SSDs are acceptable, they could have bought an optane drive with 60 drive write per day for five years endurance XD

SSDs today have lower ratings because very few (consumer) use cases would prefer more write endurance over +100/50/33% capacity from more bits per cell.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#90

Post by dylan604 »

jmclnx wrote: post #75
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.

If it's electronic, goes on me, or goes in me, it does not get purchased from Amazon
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