Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Not to Buy a SSD

andrei.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 184 posts

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#111

Post by Sayrus »

runjake wrote: post #106

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 fro…

What's crazy to me is that a small retailer selling counterfeit goods would be sued hard if not investigated for fraud. But Amazon can keep doing it without worries.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#112

Post by MDGeist »

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).

This is the reason I also go to Microcenter for components. It's too bad there are so few of them and Fry's is defunct. Not many brick and mortar options left.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#113

Post by lazide »

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.

Toyota Tundra filters (at least) are the ‘innie’ pieces, and the cup is a removable/reusable part on the vehicle. A counterfeit would be pretty obvious unless it was at the microscopic level.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#114

Post by dehrmann »

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…

Does anyone know if Amazon still comingles when Amazon in the seller? I've only seen mixed, dated info on this.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#115

Post by CamperBob2 »

JadeNB wrote: post #102
traceroute66 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They're not what I want. They can't possibly maintain a sufficiently-diverse inventory to provide what I want/need when I want/need it.

See also Wal-Mart and the decline of small-town retail. News flash: nobody actually misses them, because they never stocked anything but lowest-common-denominator merchandise.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#116

Post by Havoc »

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…

Big fan of 2nd hand enterprise SSDs strategy too but wow not like that.

The slightly more modern intel MLCs like S3700 crush the early SLCs across the board - including endurance. Would have cost you 1/3rd the price for vastly superior specs.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#117

Post by eightysixfour »

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).

Never again with the SK Hynix drives. They have an issue they've ignored for years and refuse to fix that means the cache eventually fails on them, write speeds plummet, and the drive turns to shit. They recently released a firmware to fix it and it did nothing.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/all-sk-hynix-p41-ssds-suffer...

You'll find reports from around the web of people flashing updated firmware and getting better performance for a few days or weeks, then it cuts back in half again.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#118

Post by bullen »

stavros wrote: post #91
bullen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't use SSDs, but the HDDs in my NAS started failing one by one after a few years. Whenever one failed, I just put a new one in, and that was it. ZFS rebalanced things automatically and I went on with my life. It just sounds like you spent $3k to solve a problem you could have solved with $200... Unrelatedly, does the name "Realms of Despair" mean anything to you?

HDDs make noise, you can only use them if you have more rooms than you need.

Nope

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#119

Post by multjoy »

morninglight wrote: post #109
p1mrx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

But it's also windows only...

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#120

Post by criddell »

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 ?

One advantage - it's much easier to get up and running. If you are on Windows, you can probably download it and be running it in less time than it's going to take to download the source code for f3.
Post reply on HN