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 at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.
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.
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.
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.
nah it goes on those discount wire rack shelves they have sprinkled throughout the store.
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.
Any digital platform (like social media or a marketplace), which satisfies the following conditions
- decides which wares (social media posts or products) by sellers are shown to users by automated algorithms
- Makes money when users engage with said wares
- Is owned by a large number of investors
Will, if you believe standard optimization theory and that sellers are clever, devolve into crap.
YUP.
It used to be that people would use local brick & mortar stores to examine the item and then buy it cheaper on Amazon.
I now use Amazon to search, then go buy more reliably at the source company itself, a specialized online store, or locally.
It isn't just about getting ripped off, it's about actual personal and household safety. Many categories such as electronics and batteries, I NEVER buy from Amazon, and I also understand any health & beauty products are so rife with sometimes-dangerous counterfeits that they should be also avoided. This is only going to get worse with the current US regime actively dismantling regulation and H&S systems.
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 successful storage and retrieval of random (unspoofable) test data.
The program has been extensively tested, is freely downloadable and comes from a well respected site with a long history in the security business. Steve Gibson announced this development in 2023 and it has been downloaded over 600,000 times.
In addition to this effort, Steve has been creating an in-depth weekly podcast called "Security Now" for over 20 years. An archive of all 1039 podcasts and transcripts can be found online where they are freely downloadable.
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.
`nix-shell -p f3` took about 1 second to run on my machine. I didn't even have to install Windows or sign up for an online account.
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.
Validrive is less than 100K bytes! You could download and test it in 10 minutes. That should answer any questions you may have.
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.
But it's also windows only...
SpinRite is not a Windows application. Or were you talking about ValiDrive?
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.
> 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.
Does this test actually spot modern fakes? My understanding was that they typically used simple modulo addressing such that any write was immediately readable, and even large continuous chunks operated perfectly fine, it just also "overwrote" that address every 4GB or whatever.
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
I know Steve Gibson as the author of "Trouble in Paradise", a tool for validating and testing zip disks and drives back in the day. He even aired on one of G4 TV's tech channels once. This guy knows and loves testing storage.
Excellent! I wanted to check a new SD card I bought from Amazon. It's pretty much the best as card available for use with a steam deck, yet often it needs to be reinserted which is making me suspicious
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
Worth pointing out that Amazon is mixed. Not everything is pooled. You can look at the "Dispatches from" field to tell whether its FBA or not
I'm not willing to do extra work for something that should just be standard.
The one that only tells you whether it's shipped by Amazon (pooled) or directly from the seller?
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.
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.
I'm curious with what you mean with "Even sold by Amazon". The last few years I see nothing but reports of cheap fake products over Amazon.
Years ago I ordered some T-Shirts to test and they were all fake versions that barely survived the first wash. Haven't ordered anything since then.
I think this comment references something many people don't realize: Even items that say "Ships from
Amazon, Sold by Amazon" could be counterfeit, because the inventory from third party sellers is co-mingled with Amazon's own inventory.
If you see "Ships from Amazon, Sold by RandomCompany" you might worry about counterfeits. But the "Sold by Amazon" item might also have been sourced from (or counterfeited by) "RandomCompany".
> co-mingled
Note it's actually commingled - it's not a typo despite looking like one.
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.
My current car has a traditional steel-can filter. I cut those open after oil changes to inspect for debris.
BMW at least has the media completely exposed. There is no canister like you might find on Honda oil filters. Basically on BMWs the oil filter housing is permanent. I don't think it's a BMW specific thing. Might be a German car thing?
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.
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.
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?
It does happen with Amazon UK, or at least has within the last year because I've twice had it, first time with a microsd card, second time with an ssd.
They obviously replaced it no problem but it highlighted they were either still mixing stock or were using a dodgy supplier themselves.
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.
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.
Amazon is literally just aliexpress with faster shipping at this point.
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've had a good track record with Ugreen too. Over the years I've picked up a bunch of their stuff.. adapters, cables, mounts, whatever, and every single purchase has been sturdy and reliable.
I also buy Baseus, though good luck figuring out which of the ten stores is the official one.
In my experience, Amazon is also generally more expensive than online shops specialized in one domain for branded non generic aliexpresslike items.
With the exception of those shops who sell on Amazon, who have to offer a better price on Amazon than on their own site.
I'm noticing an increasing number of brands who don't have an official Amazon presence, probably for that reason.
Lots of stuff on Amazon is also from Aliexpress or Temu. Crap, so if I need crap I'll try it on Aliexpress.
I ordered a Springer published book on Prolog from Amazon, and it was obviously printer but professional book publisher. The only difference was that almost half the physical dimensions of Springer’s usual books, and it looked as though it was printed from a DJVU file downloaded from the Internet!!
If there is a Micro Center near you, they have been reliable.
I recently had to replace an entire array of SATA SSDs with models that could support DRAT/DZAT*. Their Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs came with the original Samsung stickers sealing them, and they scanned each one to attribute it to my purchase. I'm sure it as much to protect them as me, i.e. that if I returned a drive, I gave them back the drive with the exact Device ID that originally came in that package. Nonetheless it was reassuring for me as well.
*For anyone who uses SATA drives attached to an SAS HBA, please check that your SATA drives support DRAT and DZAT. Unbeknownst to you, your drives may be failing to TRIM when connected through your HBA!
I've moved over to almost exclusively buying from B&H. They generally have similar prices to other vendors and they manage their own inventory directly with manufacturers, so no concerns about fraudulent hardware.
Me too, for the same reason. Also if you use their store credit card, they give a discount equal to the sales tax.
Yep, and living in CA that’s almost 10%.
> 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 default assumption of having the best price on the web went out of the window years ago
- next (or 2) day delivery - does not happen anymore in most cases, Prime or not
- even finding (!!) what you're searching for is a total sh.t show
- for years, Amazon is now a front for chinese cr.p shipped by the boatload
- the once useful review system has been and is being gamed, it is beyond broken these days and should not be trusted (basically forget everything that scores 4.5 or less, read all reviews and ensure that the review you're reading is not for some other variant of the item you're looking for or that the review you're looking at hasn't been swapped one item for another, because that's a thing as well on there...)
I mean - buying things on Aliexpress is more trustworthy, for crying out loud - yet, most people can't seem to be bothered. scratchinghead
I quit Prime months ago and honestly the only feature I miss is fast shipping for household items.
I can find the same or better prices (including shipping) from other suppliers.
The only reason I didn't quit Prime already is that it gives me discounts on certain items from Whole Foods. I save enough from my groceries using Prime that I don't cancel it. And Whole Foods is the grocery store closest to my home. Otherwise I rarely shop on Amazon.
Ah, the Whole Foods in my neighborhood closed years ago - they couldn't compete with the locally owned grocery that everyone already shopped at.
> after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add
If we're putting co-mingling into its own category, I don't remember any reports of fakes being sold by Amazon. Do you have any links?
> 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 item returned !
You don't get that anywhere else. At most other vendors you have to fight to even get a returns label. And even if those other vendors give you a returns label without a fight, you have to wait until their warehouse has processed your return and hope that you don't get charged a restocking fee or they try to claim some bullshit excuse about you having lightly scratched something.
Oh, you want to know another reason too ?
I don't like spreading my personal data far and wide.
Yeah, sure I'm sure I could buy my widget from some random shop. Probably at a cheaper price than Amazon too, I'm sure.
But that means another place with my personal data on their database.
Open to that company spamming me, and the Russians hacking them and spaffing my personal data all over the darkweb.
Say what you like about Amazon. But I think their Infosec practices are pretty good.
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.
That they'll give you your money back after you call them on scamming you doesn't make them a reliable source.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
I have been waiting for three weeks for them to pick up some fake POD-crap they delivered instead of the books that I had ordered and refund Rs. 800 (~ $8). I have had about 8-10 phone calls with them regarding this issue and CS is completely unbothered (with one exception, but too little too late). They do their fake apologies and set up another return pickup.
These last three weeks have been absolutely terrible as far as deliveries and Amazon CS are concerned. I have been moving all new purchases to Walmart-owned Flipkart as I no longer have the mental bandwidth to deal with these people.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
Caveat emptor though, I trusted this policy as well and got my account closed for unclear reasons. They hinted at returns fraud (not the case) and a high return rate (not the case either).
I provided detailed records of everything and even escalated this to jeff@amazon.com, no luck.
Still have a few hundred euros in Amazon Echos in storage that I cannot use anymore.
> 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"...
> 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?
Not really 100% sure why you're getting down-voted (edit: I guess not anymore. Comment was gray when I replied.), but to answer your question, no. I do not trust Amazon for anything important.
I do still sometimes use Amazon in spite of this, only because they are nonetheless very useful. They have a very wide selection, and are often able to do same-day and 1-day shipping of almost anything even over here in some random suburbia. This has become important lately because things I used to just buy physically are no longer obtainable physically. For example, the last local electronics store went out of business, and the nearest Micro-Center is probably an hour drive or so, and that's not even as good for electronics.
Still, I'm always skeptical of Amazon. I never trust that the prices are the lowest, and often they're not. And I never trust that the product will be authentic, because it might not be, though it usually still is. And yep, the review system is bullshit. You can see people playing around with "variations" to basically group unrelated things, if not literally re-using an old Amazon product ID. And when you search for anything, even if Amazon actually has decent products from known brands, they'd prefer to show you key-smash anonymous Chinese brands instead, even when the prices aren't that much cheaper anyway.
But, that's just how it goes. People voted with their wallets and they chose Amazon, and now that they did and all of the smaller local shops are all dead, Amazon doesn't really need to worry about competing with them anymore.
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 street, a new shop opened. It was the "click & collect" branch for a large national hardware retailer.
All the builders and electricians that used to shop at the little shop moved over to the large retailer because they had all their trade discounts.
The little shop couldn't survive on the random home owner just popping into buy a single screw or a short length of cable. So they shut down.
Fast forward a few years and along comes Mr Property Developer. Takes one look at the patch where the large national retailer's shop is and thinks "ooh, that looks nice".
So they bought out those shops, knocked them down and turned the plot into a high-rise instead. But the national retailer survived because by then most people were getting stuff delivered to site from online orders by couriers and not doing many collections.
So dream all you like about "support your local business". But the reality is that its more like Darwin's theory of evolution out there. Those who can adapt thrive. Those who don't will be eaten by a predator.
The reality is its 2025, we live in an ever increasing online world, and all these "local businesses" of which you speak need to learn that online footfall is just as important (if not more important) than the traditional walk-in footfall.
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.
Totally understand that and pretty much agree, the main problem I have is that the local businesses I liked to support are basically all gone. Not sure what to do now.
> 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?
For me, it's just physical books, basically.
Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
See my comment above lol :)
They may not have the best prices at every point in time, but they consistently have good deals. There are several price trackers out there; Keepa and CamelCamelCamel are the big ones. Use them to your advantage and figure out whether the item you're after is a good deal or not.
Dunno about listings on Amazon, but here’s a bust of a fraud shop resetting SMART data on drives from only six days ago:
I wanted to upgrade my NAS with some 12TB drives and two of them in the box from Amazon had been powered on (according to the SMART data) for over a year!
Thankfully got my money back.
[deleted]
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:
> The main problem now is that the product I bought now appears as a completely different product on that site, which is baffling, how can a product that’s been sold be “updated” with having a completely new photo, title, description, etc (now it’s basically a car Bluetooth adapter for 5 euros), which makes me unable to start the return process.
It's to buy fake reviews. They "sell" something very cheap so fake reviewers can buy it and write a positive review. Once done, they change the page back to the actual scam.
By the way, you should contact Kingston and notify them that you have a fraudulent drive. Chances are they'll exchange it for a new drive so they can investigate it.
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.
agreed, I don't think the drive is fake, they're just that bad. Only SSD I've ever had fail spontaneously on me (the one other SSD failiure was my fault for accidentally unplugging it during a firmware update).
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.
ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011) or Samsung (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that.
Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money.
Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.
How do you spot the fake listings?
These ones are fairly obvious as though they adopt the same model name and colouring than the original, they do not show a Samsung or WD brand. I suspect they do that to avoid giving standing to these companies to sue them. If the distributor (ebay) doesn't care, and the buyers are individuals who will not sue, they act pretty much with impunity.
The lowest hanging fruit are the ones with too good to be true prices.
Is there some software to give these drives a test drive, before putting them in use?
Reply to self, another post below mentions this software:
Unfortunately the only way I know is destructive, ie attempt a full disk write.
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.
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.
Tom's had a good article on this problem recently.
I recently got a new 4TB Seagate drive from the biggest computer/electronics retailers here, it was shipped in the worst way I've ever seen a hard drive shipped. An anti-static bag, inside of one of those slightly padded envelopes you get when you order an Arduino from AliExpress. Naturally, it had a big dent on one of the corners, and it started clicking the moment I plugged it in.
It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
When I click that I just get a giant error page from cloudfront saying that I have been blocked. Do they block all non-Israeli IPs or am I special?
I am blocked too.
Ah, okay. Thank you! :)
eMag is full of fake SSDs. Don’t ever buy from sellers, only if sold by eMag directly or from a reputable seller that you know. And it’s not only SSDs. This has been going on for many years and yes, when you give in to promotions like 70-80% the price of an original you usually get a fake.
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 price tag. Still $3.000 sounds like an aweful lot when it's only 64GB disks, but I know how it feels when your OS drive corrupts and that's not something I want to keep experiencing over and over every 5 (if you are lucky) years.
Now with a few (24/7 operation) years under their belt I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".
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
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.
No MLC lasts 5 years tops.
I have 5x SLC (40-60GB) drives from 2010 still running. Not a single SLC has failed for me ever.
I also have 5x MLC (120-400GB ones) drives that failed. All MLC have failed for me.
The stats don't look too good.
How much are you writing to those drives?
Have you tried any drives that will extend their pseudo-SLC cache across the entire space, and then only partitioned 25-30% of the nameplate capacity? That'll get you a terabyte for less than $300.
Personally I've had two SSDs in active use and both have done a lot better than that. One was MLC and died after 13 years, and the other is TLC and still working after 10 years.
>No MLC lasts 5 years tops.
A 64gb Intel’s X25-E is rated for about 2 PB of TBW.
A S3700 (400gb) is rated for 7 PB TBW range and gets you 400gb not 64gb usable space.
>The stats don't look too good.
It seems to me that you're trying very hard to not look at stats and insist on extrapolating your small sample personal experiences?
Frankly for 3k you could have built a pure optane rig of equivalent capacity that would have crushed both your X-25E suggestion and my S3700 if you're really obsessed on endurance.
I'm generally of the meet people where they are and support their journey persuasion but when someone says 64GB SATA v2 drive with no trim and really bad metrics across the board is their best ssd buy I gotta say something
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.
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.
> 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.
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 by 32-bit Raspberry 2!
You just need a bunch of older SD cards and distributed storage so that you don't loose data.
>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 lasts more than 100 years.
>Think about that, any device manufactured in the coming 50 years will be outlived by 32-bit Raspberry 2!
What's the point of it lasting 100 years if it's terribly out of date? An IDE drive from the 2000s is basically unusable today, 20 years later. CPU from around the same era is basically on its last legs because software support is being dropped[1]. Your SSDs are going to suffer the same fate. And that's not even factoring in other considerations like power consumption, and the hassle of trying to connect 30 drives to a computer.
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.
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
Everyone has a closet or cupboard under the stairs where a NAS can live. it doesnt need a room of its own.
But my argument was "a failing disk can just be swapped for another one with zero other hassle".
It might work for file storage, but I don't think the OS drives can be raided in a way that is hotswappable?
If your OS supports ZFS, I think you can, but I always put a lightweight OS on a separate drive, as it's for a NAS.
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.
This also happens a lot on AliExpress most storage devices are fake. Some 64gb flash drives, sd cards or 320gb 2.5 mobile hdds are okay. But you should run f3 test on any new drive you buy.
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
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.
What are these discrepancies, and what's off in the SMART values?
In fact I opened a failed 3.84TB SAS SSD recently and it looked fairly similar.
yeah sorry i dont have those deets anymore.. I remember they gave a lot less information than another one of the same make model and size.. I also remember the official FW refused to see the device.
It was 2 years ago.. so thats all i have :-P
Run f3fix on it, and you can use whatever portion of it is real to store low-value data, like Linux ISOs, that you could re-download if you lose, but are convenient to have locally.
Pretty much what is expected from lower capacity SSD. Flash memory does not take that much space. And if you are not at top of range you do not need to populate all grids.
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 hear this a lot online - buy used enterprise stuff online, it'll be cheaper and lasts long (at least you get your money's worth). But when you start to explore the online market for these used enterprise hardware, you find that nobody really sells it for cheap any more, at a price that makes sense to buy it. For example, if a new enterprise class SSD is $250, you may find a used one for $125. But then, brand new consumer SSDs of the same capacity are also available for $125 with warranty. At that point, it doesn't make any sense to buy used hardware, enterprise or otherwise, with no real guarantees of how usable it is. I feel the used hardware markets has also been cornered and monopolised by a few sellers, and you really have to hunt hard for a true bargain. (Maybe on Craigslist?).
I'm in Europe. It turns up cheap here. You do have to hunt for it but I bag 1.92TB disk for $70 a pop usually. I have 5 already.
I did get a used fake M.2 drive once. Likely the seller had bought a fake drive, used it for a while, then dissatisfied upgraded to something else. It possible the seller didn't know it was fake, but I doubt it.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you share which models do you aim for?
Usually whatever half decent Samsung, Micron or Intel ones are available.
I have a 10 year old Intel one in one of my machines and it's still 95% health.
I can't believe mixing a store and a marketplace on the same website still isn't illegal. Pick a lane !
I recently bought two SSDs from Chinese brands I had never heard before. My thinking being that they were reasonably priced (a bit cheaper than name brands but not by much) and that probably no-one would fake no-name brands. Reviews seemed to be mostly genuine as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so far they seem to work fine, we'll see.
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.
Very cool website! I like the theme picker and the extensive but easily navigable articles and tags.
Validrive - Free from Gibson Research
Quickly spot-check any USB mass storage drive for fraudulent deliberately missing storage.
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 at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.
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-...
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.
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.
nah it goes on those discount wire rack shelves they have sprinkled throughout the store.
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.
Any digital platform (like social media or a marketplace), which satisfies the following conditions
- decides which wares (social media posts or products) by sellers are shown to users by automated algorithms
- Makes money when users engage with said wares
- Is owned by a large number of investors
Will, if you believe standard optimization theory and that sellers are clever, devolve into crap.
YUP.
It used to be that people would use local brick & mortar stores to examine the item and then buy it cheaper on Amazon.
I now use Amazon to search, then go buy more reliably at the source company itself, a specialized online store, or locally.
It isn't just about getting ripped off, it's about actual personal and household safety. Many categories such as electronics and batteries, I NEVER buy from Amazon, and I also understand any health & beauty products are so rife with sometimes-dangerous counterfeits that they should be also avoided. This is only going to get worse with the current US regime actively dismantling regulation and H&S systems.
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 successful storage and retrieval of random (unspoofable) test data.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
The program has been extensively tested, is freely downloadable and comes from a well respected site with a long history in the security business. Steve Gibson announced this development in 2023 and it has been downloaded over 600,000 times.
https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm
In addition to this effort, Steve has been creating an in-depth weekly podcast called "Security Now" for over 20 years. An archive of all 1039 podcasts and transcripts can be found online where they are freely downloadable.
https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
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.
`nix-shell -p f3` took about 1 second to run on my machine. I didn't even have to install Windows or sign up for an online account.
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.
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.
But it's also windows only...
SpinRite is not a Windows application. Or were you talking about ValiDrive?
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.
> 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.
Does this test actually spot modern fakes? My understanding was that they typically used simple modulo addressing such that any write was immediately readable, and even large continuous chunks operated perfectly fine, it just also "overwrote" that address every 4GB or whatever.
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
I know Steve Gibson as the author of "Trouble in Paradise", a tool for validating and testing zip disks and drives back in the day. He even aired on one of G4 TV's tech channels once. This guy knows and loves testing storage.
Excellent! I wanted to check a new SD card I bought from Amazon. It's pretty much the best as card available for use with a steam deck, yet often it needs to be reinserted which is making me suspicious
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
Worth pointing out that Amazon is mixed. Not everything is pooled. You can look at the "Dispatches from" field to tell whether its FBA or not
I'm not willing to do extra work for something that should just be standard.
The one that only tells you whether it's shipped by Amazon (pooled) or directly from the seller?
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.
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.
I'm curious with what you mean with "Even sold by Amazon". The last few years I see nothing but reports of cheap fake products over Amazon.
Years ago I ordered some T-Shirts to test and they were all fake versions that barely survived the first wash. Haven't ordered anything since then.
I think this comment references something many people don't realize: Even items that say "Ships from Amazon, Sold by Amazon" could be counterfeit, because the inventory from third party sellers is co-mingled with Amazon's own inventory.
If you see "Ships from Amazon, Sold by RandomCompany" you might worry about counterfeits. But the "Sold by Amazon" item might also have been sourced from (or counterfeited by) "RandomCompany".
> co-mingled
Note it's actually commingled - it's not a typo despite looking like one.
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.
Not always - some passenger vehicle filters have exposed media. An example GM filter: https://parts.gmc.com/product/acdelco-gm-original-equipment-...
My current car has a traditional steel-can filter. I cut those open after oil changes to inspect for debris.
BMW at least has the media completely exposed. There is no canister like you might find on Honda oil filters. Basically on BMWs the oil filter housing is permanent. I don't think it's a BMW specific thing. Might be a German car thing?
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.
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.
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?
It does happen with Amazon UK, or at least has within the last year because I've twice had it, first time with a microsd card, second time with an ssd.
They obviously replaced it no problem but it highlighted they were either still mixing stock or were using a dodgy supplier themselves.
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.
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.
Amazon is literally just aliexpress with faster shipping at this point.
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've had a good track record with Ugreen too. Over the years I've picked up a bunch of their stuff.. adapters, cables, mounts, whatever, and every single purchase has been sturdy and reliable.
I also buy Baseus, though good luck figuring out which of the ten stores is the official one.
In my experience, Amazon is also generally more expensive than online shops specialized in one domain for branded non generic aliexpresslike items.
With the exception of those shops who sell on Amazon, who have to offer a better price on Amazon than on their own site.
I'm noticing an increasing number of brands who don't have an official Amazon presence, probably for that reason.
Lots of stuff on Amazon is also from Aliexpress or Temu. Crap, so if I need crap I'll try it on Aliexpress.
I ordered a Springer published book on Prolog from Amazon, and it was obviously printer but professional book publisher. The only difference was that almost half the physical dimensions of Springer’s usual books, and it looked as though it was printed from a DJVU file downloaded from the Internet!!
If there is a Micro Center near you, they have been reliable.
I recently had to replace an entire array of SATA SSDs with models that could support DRAT/DZAT*. Their Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs came with the original Samsung stickers sealing them, and they scanned each one to attribute it to my purchase. I'm sure it as much to protect them as me, i.e. that if I returned a drive, I gave them back the drive with the exact Device ID that originally came in that package. Nonetheless it was reassuring for me as well.
*For anyone who uses SATA drives attached to an SAS HBA, please check that your SATA drives support DRAT and DZAT. Unbeknownst to you, your drives may be failing to TRIM when connected through your HBA!
I've moved over to almost exclusively buying from B&H. They generally have similar prices to other vendors and they manage their own inventory directly with manufacturers, so no concerns about fraudulent hardware.
Me too, for the same reason. Also if you use their store credit card, they give a discount equal to the sales tax.
Yep, and living in CA that’s almost 10%.
> 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 default assumption of having the best price on the web went out of the window years ago
- next (or 2) day delivery - does not happen anymore in most cases, Prime or not
- even finding (!!) what you're searching for is a total sh.t show
- for years, Amazon is now a front for chinese cr.p shipped by the boatload
- the once useful review system has been and is being gamed, it is beyond broken these days and should not be trusted (basically forget everything that scores 4.5 or less, read all reviews and ensure that the review you're reading is not for some other variant of the item you're looking for or that the review you're looking at hasn't been swapped one item for another, because that's a thing as well on there...)
I mean - buying things on Aliexpress is more trustworthy, for crying out loud - yet, most people can't seem to be bothered. scratchinghead
I quit Prime months ago and honestly the only feature I miss is fast shipping for household items.
I can find the same or better prices (including shipping) from other suppliers.
The only reason I didn't quit Prime already is that it gives me discounts on certain items from Whole Foods. I save enough from my groceries using Prime that I don't cancel it. And Whole Foods is the grocery store closest to my home. Otherwise I rarely shop on Amazon.
Ah, the Whole Foods in my neighborhood closed years ago - they couldn't compete with the locally owned grocery that everyone already shopped at.
> after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add
If we're putting co-mingling into its own category, I don't remember any reports of fakes being sold by Amazon. Do you have any links?
> 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 item returned !
You don't get that anywhere else. At most other vendors you have to fight to even get a returns label. And even if those other vendors give you a returns label without a fight, you have to wait until their warehouse has processed your return and hope that you don't get charged a restocking fee or they try to claim some bullshit excuse about you having lightly scratched something.
Oh, you want to know another reason too ?
I don't like spreading my personal data far and wide.
Yeah, sure I'm sure I could buy my widget from some random shop. Probably at a cheaper price than Amazon too, I'm sure.
But that means another place with my personal data on their database.
Open to that company spamming me, and the Russians hacking them and spaffing my personal data all over the darkweb.
Say what you like about Amazon. But I think their Infosec practices are pretty good.
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.
That they'll give you your money back after you call them on scamming you doesn't make them a reliable source.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
I have been waiting for three weeks for them to pick up some fake POD-crap they delivered instead of the books that I had ordered and refund Rs. 800 (~ $8). I have had about 8-10 phone calls with them regarding this issue and CS is completely unbothered (with one exception, but too little too late). They do their fake apologies and set up another return pickup.
These last three weeks have been absolutely terrible as far as deliveries and Amazon CS are concerned. I have been moving all new purchases to Walmart-owned Flipkart as I no longer have the mental bandwidth to deal with these people.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
Caveat emptor though, I trusted this policy as well and got my account closed for unclear reasons. They hinted at returns fraud (not the case) and a high return rate (not the case either).
I provided detailed records of everything and even escalated this to jeff@amazon.com, no luck.
Still have a few hundred euros in Amazon Echos in storage that I cannot use anymore.
> 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"...
> 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?
Not really 100% sure why you're getting down-voted (edit: I guess not anymore. Comment was gray when I replied.), but to answer your question, no. I do not trust Amazon for anything important.
I do still sometimes use Amazon in spite of this, only because they are nonetheless very useful. They have a very wide selection, and are often able to do same-day and 1-day shipping of almost anything even over here in some random suburbia. This has become important lately because things I used to just buy physically are no longer obtainable physically. For example, the last local electronics store went out of business, and the nearest Micro-Center is probably an hour drive or so, and that's not even as good for electronics.
Still, I'm always skeptical of Amazon. I never trust that the prices are the lowest, and often they're not. And I never trust that the product will be authentic, because it might not be, though it usually still is. And yep, the review system is bullshit. You can see people playing around with "variations" to basically group unrelated things, if not literally re-using an old Amazon product ID. And when you search for anything, even if Amazon actually has decent products from known brands, they'd prefer to show you key-smash anonymous Chinese brands instead, even when the prices aren't that much cheaper anyway.
But, that's just how it goes. People voted with their wallets and they chose Amazon, and now that they did and all of the smaller local shops are all dead, Amazon doesn't really need to worry about competing with them anymore.
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 street, a new shop opened. It was the "click & collect" branch for a large national hardware retailer.
All the builders and electricians that used to shop at the little shop moved over to the large retailer because they had all their trade discounts.
The little shop couldn't survive on the random home owner just popping into buy a single screw or a short length of cable. So they shut down.
Fast forward a few years and along comes Mr Property Developer. Takes one look at the patch where the large national retailer's shop is and thinks "ooh, that looks nice".
So they bought out those shops, knocked them down and turned the plot into a high-rise instead. But the national retailer survived because by then most people were getting stuff delivered to site from online orders by couriers and not doing many collections.
So dream all you like about "support your local business". But the reality is that its more like Darwin's theory of evolution out there. Those who can adapt thrive. Those who don't will be eaten by a predator.
The reality is its 2025, we live in an ever increasing online world, and all these "local businesses" of which you speak need to learn that online footfall is just as important (if not more important) than the traditional walk-in footfall.
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.
Totally understand that and pretty much agree, the main problem I have is that the local businesses I liked to support are basically all gone. Not sure what to do now.
> 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?
For me, it's just physical books, basically.
Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
See my comment above lol :)
They may not have the best prices at every point in time, but they consistently have good deals. There are several price trackers out there; Keepa and CamelCamelCamel are the big ones. Use them to your advantage and figure out whether the item you're after is a good deal or not.
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...
I wanted to upgrade my NAS with some 12TB drives and two of them in the box from Amazon had been powered on (according to the SMART data) for over a year!
Thankfully got my money back.
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/
> The main problem now is that the product I bought now appears as a completely different product on that site, which is baffling, how can a product that’s been sold be “updated” with having a completely new photo, title, description, etc (now it’s basically a car Bluetooth adapter for 5 euros), which makes me unable to start the return process.
It's to buy fake reviews. They "sell" something very cheap so fake reviewers can buy it and write a positive review. Once done, they change the page back to the actual scam.
By the way, you should contact Kingston and notify them that you have a fraudulent drive. Chances are they'll exchange it for a new drive so they can investigate it.
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.
agreed, I don't think the drive is fake, they're just that bad. Only SSD I've ever had fail spontaneously on me (the one other SSD failiure was my fault for accidentally unplugging it during a firmware update).
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.
ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011) or Samsung (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that.
Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money. Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.
How do you spot the fake listings?
These ones are fairly obvious as though they adopt the same model name and colouring than the original, they do not show a Samsung or WD brand. I suspect they do that to avoid giving standing to these companies to sue them. If the distributor (ebay) doesn't care, and the buyers are individuals who will not sue, they act pretty much with impunity.
The lowest hanging fruit are the ones with too good to be true prices.
Is there some software to give these drives a test drive, before putting them in use?
Reply to self, another post below mentions this software:
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
Unfortunately the only way I know is destructive, ie attempt a full disk write.
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.
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.
Tom's had a good article on this problem recently.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
(the title is also ~p~fun)
I recently got a new 4TB Seagate drive from the biggest computer/electronics retailers here, it was shipped in the worst way I've ever seen a hard drive shipped. An anti-static bag, inside of one of those slightly padded envelopes you get when you order an Arduino from AliExpress. Naturally, it had a big dent on one of the corners, and it started clicking the moment I plugged it in.
It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
What was the name of the retailer?
KSP
https://ksp.co.il/
When I click that I just get a giant error page from cloudfront saying that I have been blocked. Do they block all non-Israeli IPs or am I special?
I am blocked too.
Ah, okay. Thank you! :)
eMag is full of fake SSDs. Don’t ever buy from sellers, only if sold by eMag directly or from a reputable seller that you know. And it’s not only SSDs. This has been going on for many years and yes, when you give in to promotions like 70-80% the price of an original you usually get a fake.
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 price tag. Still $3.000 sounds like an aweful lot when it's only 64GB disks, but I know how it feels when your OS drive corrupts and that's not something I want to keep experiencing over and over every 5 (if you are lucky) years.
Now with a few (24/7 operation) years under their belt I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".
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
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.
No MLC lasts 5 years tops.
I have 5x SLC (40-60GB) drives from 2010 still running. Not a single SLC has failed for me ever.
I also have 5x MLC (120-400GB ones) drives that failed. All MLC have failed for me.
The stats don't look too good.
How much are you writing to those drives?
Have you tried any drives that will extend their pseudo-SLC cache across the entire space, and then only partitioned 25-30% of the nameplate capacity? That'll get you a terabyte for less than $300.
Personally I've had two SSDs in active use and both have done a lot better than that. One was MLC and died after 13 years, and the other is TLC and still working after 10 years.
>No MLC lasts 5 years tops.
A 64gb Intel’s X25-E is rated for about 2 PB of TBW.
A S3700 (400gb) is rated for 7 PB TBW range and gets you 400gb not 64gb usable space.
>The stats don't look too good.
It seems to me that you're trying very hard to not look at stats and insist on extrapolating your small sample personal experiences?
Frankly for 3k you could have built a pure optane rig of equivalent capacity that would have crushed both your X-25E suggestion and my S3700 if you're really obsessed on endurance.
I'm generally of the meet people where they are and support their journey persuasion but when someone says 64GB SATA v2 drive with no trim and really bad metrics across the board is their best ssd buy I gotta say something
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.
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.
> 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/s4620.html
And quite amusingly, any modern SATA SSD runs at the top of SATA3/SATA600 specs, with ~500MB/s for read and write:
While Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive is SATA2/SATA300 and runs at 250MB/s at reading: https://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/ssd/pdfs/Extreme-SA...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 by 32-bit Raspberry 2!
You just need a bunch of older SD cards and distributed storage so that you don't loose data.
>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 lasts more than 100 years.
>Think about that, any device manufactured in the coming 50 years will be outlived by 32-bit Raspberry 2!
What's the point of it lasting 100 years if it's terribly out of date? An IDE drive from the 2000s is basically unusable today, 20 years later. CPU from around the same era is basically on its last legs because software support is being dropped[1]. Your SSDs are going to suffer the same fate. And that's not even factoring in other considerations like power consumption, and the hassle of trying to connect 30 drives to a computer.
[1] eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18mrxjk/debian_end_o...
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.
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
Everyone has a closet or cupboard under the stairs where a NAS can live. it doesnt need a room of its own.
But my argument was "a failing disk can just be swapped for another one with zero other hassle".
It might work for file storage, but I don't think the OS drives can be raided in a way that is hotswappable?
If your OS supports ZFS, I think you can, but I always put a lightweight OS on a separate drive, as it's for a NAS.
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.
This also happens a lot on AliExpress most storage devices are fake. Some 64gb flash drives, sd cards or 320gb 2.5 mobile hdds are okay. But you should run f3 test on any new drive you buy.
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
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.
What are these discrepancies, and what's off in the SMART values?
In fact I opened a failed 3.84TB SAS SSD recently and it looked fairly similar.
yeah sorry i dont have those deets anymore.. I remember they gave a lot less information than another one of the same make model and size.. I also remember the official FW refused to see the device.
It was 2 years ago.. so thats all i have :-P
Run f3fix on it, and you can use whatever portion of it is real to store low-value data, like Linux ISOs, that you could re-download if you lose, but are convenient to have locally.
Pretty much what is expected from lower capacity SSD. Flash memory does not take that much space. And if you are not at top of range you do not need to populate all grids.
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 hear this a lot online - buy used enterprise stuff online, it'll be cheaper and lasts long (at least you get your money's worth). But when you start to explore the online market for these used enterprise hardware, you find that nobody really sells it for cheap any more, at a price that makes sense to buy it. For example, if a new enterprise class SSD is $250, you may find a used one for $125. But then, brand new consumer SSDs of the same capacity are also available for $125 with warranty. At that point, it doesn't make any sense to buy used hardware, enterprise or otherwise, with no real guarantees of how usable it is. I feel the used hardware markets has also been cornered and monopolised by a few sellers, and you really have to hunt hard for a true bargain. (Maybe on Craigslist?).
I'm in Europe. It turns up cheap here. You do have to hunt for it but I bag 1.92TB disk for $70 a pop usually. I have 5 already.
I did get a used fake M.2 drive once. Likely the seller had bought a fake drive, used it for a while, then dissatisfied upgraded to something else. It possible the seller didn't know it was fake, but I doubt it.
> 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.
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.
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.
Could you share which models do you aim for?
Usually whatever half decent Samsung, Micron or Intel ones are available.
I have a 10 year old Intel one in one of my machines and it's still 95% health.
I can't believe mixing a store and a marketplace on the same website still isn't illegal. Pick a lane !
I recently bought two SSDs from Chinese brands I had never heard before. My thinking being that they were reasonably priced (a bit cheaper than name brands but not by much) and that probably no-one would fake no-name brands. Reviews seemed to be mostly genuine as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so far they seem to work fine, we'll see.
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.
Very cool website! I like the theme picker and the extensive but easily navigable articles and tags.
Validrive - Free from Gibson Research
Quickly spot-check any USB mass storage drive for fraudulent deliberately missing storage.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
Weight ... the weight...... it's so obvious