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How Not to Buy a SSD

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Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#101

Post by RankingMember »

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…

I'm a big fan of Microcenter for this kind of stuff and hope they can hang on (I was disappointed to see one of the ones near me reducing its store footprint).

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#102

Post by JadeNB »

traceroute66 wrote: post #50
Moru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go out of my way to support local business. I don't care if I have to wait a day or two more. So be it. I am NOT supporting amazon.

> I go out of my way to support local business. Let me tell you a little story my friend .... Near my friend's house, there used to be a little mulit-generation "mom & pop" hardware shop. It was an aladdin's cave. As a customer the place looked a mess, floor to ceiling (and even the ceiling !) covered in hardware widgets. But the owner could wave his magic wand and go find exactly what you wanted. One day, across the…

This seems to be saying "you shouldn't bother supporting your local businesses because not enough people do it to make it worthwhile." But, if they're what we want, somebody has to be the one to start shifting support back to them.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#104

Post by toast0 »

lelele wrote: post #83
Cervisia wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could look for SAS or u.2 ssds. Those would be enterprise for sure, but then you need specialty interfaces to use them... Otoh, used enterprise multiport SAS HBAs are also often cheap... many people shop for them to build large sata arrays.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#105

Post by jabroni_salad »

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.

Look specifically for the feature "power loss protection" (or PLP). This is a bank of capacitors that allows the drive to finish its current write in the event of a power loss. really common feature in enterprise drives.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#106

Post by runjake »

I've bought two counterfeit drives on Amazon -- one in 2024, and one in 2025. One sold by Amazon. Another I thought I was buying from Amazon directly but came from a seller.

They looked completely, COMPLETELY legit. Enough that I initially doubted OEM support when the drives failed and I contacted them and they pointed out my drive's serial number doesn't even match the legit's format. They weren't even relabeled from a lower tier model.

The saving grace is that I have Prime, so getting refunds was relatively easy after a couple quick back and forths.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#107

Post by BizarroLand »

RankingMember wrote: post #101
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…

I'm a big fan of Microcenter for this kind of stuff and hope they can hang on (I was disappointed to see one of the ones near me reducing its store footprint).

I just wish Microcenter would come to Oregon or Washington. Fry's is out of business, they would have no competitor other than best buy in either state, and they already have a store in California and Colorado so it's not like it's an enormous distance barrier to overcome.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#108

Post by lazide »

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…

I don’t remember it as not trusting smaller retailers (as in they would sell you fraudulent goods). I remember it as they would have old stock and try to charge you crazy high prices for it, if they had it at all.

Smaller online retailers, yeah there was trust issues, but a lot of that was due to ‘do they even exist’ and card fraud (due to someone stealing the numbers). That someone would just ship you bullshit was a rare thought. More like they’d just not actually even exist.

And at the beginning (before it got gamified by every scammer under the sun), Amazon was generally quite reliable (it was very rare to have a fake or fraudulent listing), a good way to get almost anything you needed, and quite fast. Not as fast as brick and mortar where you could walk over and get something (if they had it in stock), but WAY faster than almost any other online retailer.

Shipping bullshit/fakes/counterfeit has really taken off as Amazon has killed competition and ‘scaled’, to the point that Alibaba seems like the saner choice most of the time. Which is just nuts.

I agree on the shop local thing. It may be older/somewhat out of date. It may cost more. But you can see in person if it exists and what it actually looks like, and it’s exceptionally rare to have true fraud at brick and mortar because someone can actually go to jail where you live if it happens.

Random online seller? Good luck, even if it may be actual wire fraud or the like.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#109

Post by morninglight »

p1mrx wrote: post #99
morninglight wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's problems with fraudulent memory products were well documented in 2023 when GRC published their test results for a dozen such drives purchased from the site. In response, GRC developed a free program, called "ValiDrive", to scan and test drives for this growing problem. ValiDrive performs a quick, random-sequence spot-check across the drive's entire declared storage space. At every location it verifies the su…

ValiDrive is Windows-only and closed source. Does it have any advantages over https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 ?

ValiDrive was designed to be fast and nondestructive -

In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.

For in-depth analysis, Gibson's "SpinRite" can be used -

The two programs are complimentary but very different. ValiDrive quickly checks for the presence of any storage at 576 locations across a drive's storage media. SpinRite thoroughly, deeply and fully examines, verifies, and exercises any drive's storage media, while also performing comprehensive data recovery if necessary.

So, ValiDrive is a “quickie” test to see whether any storage is present, whereas SpinRite is the heavy hitter that verifies every byte of a drive's storage to verify its integrity and reliability.

SpinRite is a data professional's tool at a hobbyist price - inexpensive, but not free.

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Validrive is less than 100K bytes! You could download and test it in 10 minutes. That should answer any questions you may have.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#110

Post by drfuchs »

morninglight wrote: post #93
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…

Amazon's problems with fraudulent memory products were well documented in 2023 when GRC published their test results for a dozen such drives purchased from the site. In response, GRC developed a free program, called "ValiDrive", to scan and test drives for this growing problem. ValiDrive performs a quick, random-sequence spot-check across the drive's entire declared storage space. At every location it verifies the su…

Steve Gibson? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time… Maybe 30 years? SpinRite?
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