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How Not to Buy a SSD

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Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#151

Post by criddell »

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...

SpinRite is not a Windows application. Or were you talking about ValiDrive?

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#152

Post by spydum »

hangonhn wrote: post #145
justsomehnguy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the usage and the initial claimed DWPD. I've seen Samsung 860 Pro (DWPD of 0.6 ) doing fine after years under LUKS (the worst case for SSD). As soon as you go for DWPD > 1 (real or effective) the wearout is not a problem.

Why is LUKS bad fro SSDs? I'm thinking of using LUKS for my USB thumb drive.

it's not. I think there were some corner cases where the storage controller or SSD may use compression, in which.. the random nature of LUKS would cause more writes, but I'm not sure thats a real concern.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#153

Post by justsomehnguy »

hangonhn wrote: post #145
justsomehnguy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the usage and the initial claimed DWPD. I've seen Samsung 860 Pro (DWPD of 0.6 ) doing fine after years under LUKS (the worst case for SSD). As soon as you go for DWPD > 1 (real or effective) the wearout is not a problem.

Why is LUKS bad fro SSDs? I'm thinking of using LUKS for my USB thumb drive.

LUKS as any other encryption encrypts the whole device, which means your whole drive is filled with a white noise and you lose TRIM.

It would be fine for the occassional write operations but if you use it for the system drive you are effectively run with the write amplification 24/7 (for a server and my example up there was for the server, not for a notebook which would have only 8-12 hours of operation a day at most).

So it boils down for the usage pattern.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#154

Post by zh3 »

dotancohen wrote: post #46
zh3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon UK With replacement phone or laptop batteries, most definitely. I've seen other stuff sold that looked sketchy enough to not be worth the risk.

Most definitely what? There are counterfeits, or there are not counterfeits?

Definitely fakes.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#155

Post by krackers »

Panzer04 wrote: post #87
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.

Not the same longevity characteristics, I thought newer SSDs are TLC compared to SLC of old SSDs

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#157

Post by FireBeyond »

ChiefNotAClue wrote: post #33
gmac wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen this stated many times on HN, but never knowingly experienced it with Amazon in the UK. Is it possible this varies by market?

For what it's worth, been buying from Amazon for the past 15 years or so, and not once received a counterfeit product. Granted, I still don't like they they mix up their inventory, but I think it's a smaller problem than people make it to be. Most people are buying household supplies off of Amazon; that's not really a category that gets affected by counterfeits.

I can say I've received counterfeit camera and laptop batteries, counterfeit chargers and USB chargers (like Anker), and SD/microSD cards from Amazon.

All of that stuff I buy now from BH or Adorama.

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#158

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

> 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.

Hah, exceptions and all, but let me tell you of the absurdity that was me getting a broken bottle of shampoo and Amazon trying to insist that I return the "unused portion" (which was poured out into the bubble wrap mailer) to get a refund. Shockingly (only to Amazon), the UPS store didn't want a Ziploc bag of shampoo.

So they agreed to send a replacement.

Which also was broken.

"I want a refund."

"You already got a replacement, you can't have a refund." "The free replacement was also broken." "We can't refund a free replacement." "I've still paid for a bottle of shampoo that I haven't got". "Oh... uhhh..." before "my supervisor has made an exception and we are issuing a refund"...

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#159

Post by alsetmusic »

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.

Dunno about listings on Amazon, but here’s a bust of a fraud shop resetting SMART data on drives from only six days ago:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...

Re: How Not to Buy a SSD

#160

Post by p_ing »

drfuchs wrote: post #110
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…

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

Steve “RAW sockets Will Destroy the Internet” Gibson
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