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How Not to Buy a SSD

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Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#121

Post by bullen »

gruez wrote: post #92
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…

>Just like DDR3 has the lowest CAS latency with ok bandwidth and longevity. Source? AFAIK successive generations eventually had the same or slightly CAS latency in absolute terms. However, because CAS latency is measured in clock cycles, and successive generations have higher clock speeds, the latency "number" is higher, but that's an illusion. DDR3-1600 CL8 has the same latency as DDR4-3200 CL16. >DDR2 probably last…

As you increase Hz you increase energy and then your components fail faster.

The point is "the 1000 hour computer" = we are going into rent seeking hardware.

I'm obviously not going to use 30 SSDs in one computer.

You can google "perma computing" if really want to binge.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#122

Post by frantathefranta »

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 like Microcenter a lot but this reminded me that the one thing I had issues with was buying a 256GB M.2 SSD there (I think from their in-store Inland brand) and it only ever showed up as 1GB. I don't know if it was a QA issue or a RMA swap but who knows. Obviously they were fine with me returning it and hopefully they didn't put it back on the shelf.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#123

Post by bullen »

Panzer04 wrote: post #89
justsomehnguy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I looked at those, too expensive and hard to use one drive on 30 computers.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#124

Post by throwway120385 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #45
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…

> do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket? Not the person you're asking, but yes, I do. You know the biggest reason wny ? Their no-bullshit returns policy. Seriously. Click button, get your returns label. The refund is sent to you as soon as the courier or post office has scanned the barcode. Hell, sometimes Amazon just refund you and don't even want the…

I closed off my Prime because I kept having terrible experiences returning things and then having them claw back the refund on things they returned. For a few items I had to call 3 or 4 times over the course of 6 months because the claw-back kept getting re-applied to the card despite the CSR repeatedly telling me it was solved and not to worry about it. That plus the counterfeit items I've gotten over the years plus the general crap quality of everything was enough for me. In my experience you have to really stay on top of them, and you're probably not having that experience because you're not ordering things like clothing where you need to get a lot of items and then return almost all of them for not fitting or for not looking anything like the image online.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#125

Post by tomxor »

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…

Spinrite is for HDDs, sure you can use it on SSDs but that's fairly useless in the best case and actively destructive in the worst case. The whole point of Spinrite is exploiting the magnetic nature of HDDs for recovery, that's the only thing that distinguishes it from other generic block device analysis and data recovery software. For SSDs there are plenty of open source software that will work just as well for reading raw data (but what you get for unallocated blocks is at the whim of proprietary SSD controllers anyway).

Spinrite had utility for combating data loss inherent to the HDD medium... I don't like the idea of ValidDrive because it's a paid user tool to fight fraud, that's a bad incentive, you don't want to benefit from that, it should be free and open.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#126

Post by Havoc »

Not just fakes that but I'm also finding consumer ones seem to die a lot...

I ended up building a NAS from 2nd hand enterprise SSD plus optanes. Cheap, fast & resilient.

Normally not so keen on 2nd hand storage, but the combination of enterprise (tons of endurance) plus full mirrored is an acceptable risk to me. And (also mirrored) optanes for metadata and small files means everything feels super snappy

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#127

Post by jchw »

pipes wrote: post #97
jchw wrote: post #4

In general I am afraid to buy storage devices except directly from the vendor at the moment. I've heard that there's also lots of fraudulent HDDs being sold with botched SMART data, even on Amazon, even marked as "New", even sold by Amazon. Scary proposition unless you're dying to test out your RAID array redundancy.

How do you buy directly from vendor? Genuine question!

At the very least, Western Digital and Seagate both simply do direct sales on their websites:

https://www.westerndigital.com/products

https://www.seagate.com/products/shop/

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#128

Post by pkaye »

dehrmann wrote: post #114
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.

I've read that its already an option for sellers to avoid comingling. But you have to have a special barcodes or stickers to track them separately.

https://www.sostocked.com/amazon-commingled-inventory/#pros-...

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#129

Post by lazide »

multjoy wrote: post #119
morninglight wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, though for non-windows (assuming you don’t mind nuking any disk contents), various permutations of dd, md5sum, and pipes work pretty well.

Windows is….. significantly more challenging.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#130

Post by lazide »

Sayrus wrote: post #111
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.

They help the sellers do crazy shell games to avoid consequences (also to game reviews!). It’s quite impressive.
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