Disk Prices on Amazon
diskprices.com
diskprices.com
I was even able to jump through hoops to get bitlocker working with hardware encryption, so I'm getting full disk encryption at nearly spec speeds. Awesomeness.
EDIT: It's a shame the situation with RAID controller software, drivers, and physical controllers is such a crap show ATM. Doing anything "enterprise" with them seems a bit of a cluster F ATM. Anyone know what's up with that?
In IDE, SATA, SAS, you wire up to RAID. In NVMe, you skip the raid controller.
So you can still RAID, but it’s either software or some device with a “private” bus like those PCIe cards that hold 4 m2 sticks. Or IDK how others work.
I just know for Enterprise right now, you get NVMe -OR- RAID. Sucks because I had some screaming drives picked out super cheap but had to ditch them in favor of slower SAS drives. But... those slower and smaller SAS drives in RAID10 will be faster than the RAID1 NMVe plan I had.
I just found some simplistic software RAID benchmarks on Phoronix[1][2], there may be better ones (I would be interested to see how much CPU the software raid processing takes during some of these tests, even if just to confirm to myself it doesn't take much).
1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-...
2: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418...
Storage spaces do offer redundancy but how it works is a mystery I never had the courage to trust production server to it.
Actually I was a bit curious about this so just tried reading some raw images off the zfs pool with no directives against caching or anything to hit the absolute maximum possible read speeds, even with the read speeds getting well above 1GB/sec it still wasn't showing any visible impact on any cores in terms of either truecrypt or zfs. Almost wondering if they're hidden somehow at this stage. If they're not though it seems the performance impact is so low it gets nowhere near restricting throughput compared to uncompressed / unencrypted speeds.
The guys making storage controller ASICs weren't really prepared to start pushing 3M+ IOPS through their entry-level products. If you want to get your money's worth of performance out of NVMe SSDs, you can't have much of an abstraction layer sitting in front of them, especially not one that translates them into SCSI devices. It also doesn't take many drives before the RAID controller's host interface is the bottleneck, because the RAID card can't go into a slot wider than PCIe x16, and most are just x8.
On the other hand, actually using that much storage performance requires a ton of software engineering effort on the application side, and quickly pushes you toward a clustered approach where a traditional RAID controller isn't all that useful. "Software Defined Storage", NVMe over Fabrics, etc. are popular because it's hard to actually keep 24 NVMe SSDs busy with just a 2P 2U server.
I wish some SSD manufacturers would get third party audits of their firmware which can say "We believe data stored on this SSD is not decryptable without an externally provided key". It ought to be pretty trivial to inspect the source to verify all keys which can derive the master key are never written to persistent storage.
"It's secure because we say so"
"It's secure, and we have a published design and audit"
"It's open source"
"We're offering a reward to anyone who can break it"
"Our company would go under if anyone found a flaw in it"
SSD's are currently at the first stage.
As many programmers admit themselves, it's also their job/duty/etc. to audit open source code but most actually don't especially for the sprawling, complex code. When everybody's responsible nobody is. It's better than closed source and security through obscurity but potential is only valuable if exploited. OSS without audit could be in some cases just as (in)secure as closed source simply because it may provide its own layer of obscurity through complexity and the expectation that "someone" will check. Someone else.
"I designed it" (and was checked)
"I built it myself"
Which is actually cumulative with what you wrote. We currently have a bit of a "trusting trust" issue with open hardware: how do you check that the fab didn't tamper with your ICs before manufacturing them?
Same goes for deployable software. How do you know that that program is compiled from that source?
Otherwise (android app? Browser js/html/css?) you separately compile gmail. Assuming the build is reproductible, you can check that its hash corresponds to what was sent to you.
SATA1 - 1.5Gb/s SATA2 - 3.0Gb/s SATA3 - 6.0Gb/s
SATA3 is often referred to as SATA6G although because of 8b/10b encoding overhead you a SATA6G link maxes out at 4.8Gb/s
There are many NVMe SSDs that use 4 lanes of PCI-E Gen 3 which is just under 32Gb/s
If you read this review you can see read speeds of 3500MB/s which is 28Gb/s or just under the 32Gb/s limit.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13761/the-samsung-970-evo-plu...
I am using lowercase "b" for bit and capital "B" for byte
Idk but what I’ve heard is anecdotal small files I/O and boot time speed up stories so webdevs might appreciate it on next builds. The premium is dropping fast anyway.
I only stay subscribed to the NewEgg emails to watch retail HDD/SSD prices. The prices always amaze me, I member paying over 100$ for a 32mb usb drive and our first HDD in a home PC was a 200 something megabyte caviar.
It makes me wonder what things will be like in another 25 years.
Remember that motherboard RAID isn't RAID if your motherboard dies. You might as well do software RAID.
Edit: Oh right, probably TRIM problems.
NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives. Provantage is another reputable vendor that usually has decent prices.
If you're local to the SF bay area, check out Central Computers. King Star USA also works if you're a business customer making a large purchase.
It's worth doing a warranty check with the manufacturer as soon as you receive the drive if there's any possibility at all it might not be up and up, so that you have an opportunity to return the drive if you want to.
Even if the drive is legitimate, a vendor might sell you an OEM drive which means having to go through that vendor for warranty service instead of direct with the manufacturer. That might be too much of a hassle.
DVD/BluRay implement a lot of the distribution layer of segmentation in hardware and software, but the notion exists in lots of goods, such as in the marketing of high-end watches to different countries.
There's been oh-so-many reports that even if you're buying from the official store of any known brand, with FBA, then you might as well still receive a knock-off, due to the inventory co-mingling issue. Have they ever resolved this for good, or is noone really bothers to even pay any attention to this anymore?
It is cheaper than almost every other computer store in the UK for the same parts, deliver next day and they don't tend to shaft you on delivery cost (if it costs anything at all).
Unless you are near one of the large online shops and need something delivered next day there is no other option than Amazon.
Run your next purchasing decision through Google shopping. You may be surprised.
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/Hy97YJ/msi-b450-tomahawk...
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/Y6Crxr/fractal-design-me...
etc.
It sometimes makes sense to spread the parts buy across a couple of vendors to save costs - of course too many vendors and delivery costs eat into the savings. But it's quite rare that I've ended up buying anything other than monitors and the occasional component from Amazon.
As far as I know it doesn't happen in the UK at all. I have placed 200+ orders with Amazon in last year alone and haven't had any issues except for a couple deliveries which were a day late(Amazon extended my prime by a month each time). 99% of my deliveries arrive in 1 day as promised. They have exemplary customer service as well. In a way, I don't understand why you'd buy from anyone else but amazon :P
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/16/647377213/fake-bike-helmets-c...
Amazon itself has admitted it has a counterfeit problem to it's investors
https://qz.com/1542839/amazon-has-finally-admitted-to-invest...
Beyond that there's been documented cases by manufacturers such as Birkenstock and Apple plus the eclipse sunglasses.
One aspect is that not everything has counterfeit counterparts, e.g. there is no counter-counterfeit to, specific counterfeits, products that require exotic parts, or foods.
I’ve never seen a 4-cell(Lipo) knockoff battery for Lenovo X200 and I know the reason is because it is not easily possible to source appropriate components.
So there could be specific usage model for Amazon of a person that could completely avoid receiving unexpected items.
In case anyone's wondering, the fake i7 was some sort of Celeron with an i7 sticker on top - the real one is engraved/printed and has a different shape.
Sometimes waiting too long for your personal trust to be broken (after seeing them drop on others) can be a lot worse than just a broken toy.
Anything food/supplement related always has reviews mentioning mold, substitutions etc. Cables and electronics are often counterfeit or of questionable quality. I've seen threads here on HN about counterfeit new books. Just not worth the headache of trying to find something that you think is legit and then hoping that co-mingled products alleged to be that don't get shipped to you instead.
And the solution for the whole industry is the same thing with some distributed ledger or some very light centralized authority (like MAC or UPC vendor assignments) plus vendor-specific databases.
Also, Amazon charges $0.05/UNIT for this!
Source: I am a consultant for Amazon Suppliers. The problem is not as bad as OC exclaims, but its slightly annoying.
Later, sellers attempting to co-mingle inventory are provided a seller-specific SKU that is matched to the parent and they're required to use. This ties all issues on their orders back to their store.
This still requires lots of human intervention, which sucks.
I'm pretty sure there's no real warranty, I have no idea where these drives even came from, I have no trust in "Amazon Renewed," and I have a fear the drives are actually a bit smaller, but run a hacked firmware. But I saved $120 on the pair, so rolling the dice...
I assume the seller just sources defective drives from somewhere and directly resells them as refurbished, letting the buyer do the actual testing. I assume this must work because some drives might erroneously been marked defective when it was really a sofstware issue, or other hw problem, like faulty sata cable, mainboard, loose connection, and then obviously there are drives with minor issues, like just a few reallocated sectors, that the naive buyer might not be aware of.
Honestly, if price isn't a motivating factor CDW still exists (and if you're making large business purchases you'll definitely get better pricing).
My experiences with Amazon have been amazing; I bought two 1TB 970 pro's when they just came out (hella expensive), and one of them was faulty. After explaining my troubleshoot, they were like: ok, sounds like you know what you are doing, we'll send you a new one, be sure to return the one that's faulty in the next few days. I was blown away, amazing experience for me and certainly a reason for me to look at Amazon first when I need something else.
Be very careful even buying new drives from party vendors on Newegg. I've gotten quite a few that were advertised as new but report over 30,000 hours of power-on time.
It turns out my experience is far from unique. Basically, very few people will check the SMART data, so the vast majority of the reviews are fine. If you do happen to catch it, Newegg will of course ultimately step in and force the vendor to fix it -- but that's about it. The first vendor that scammed me appears to still be doing brisk business on the site over a year later, with mostly 4 and 5 star reviews.
Don't buy from https://www.newegg.com/TEKDEALZ to start with.
I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.
Amazon's particularly bad, though few retailers are much better.
An advantage of going directly to a manufacturer or B&M retailer's page is actually the reduced set of possible products. You still get irrelevant results, but vastly fewer.
Less is more.
Finding and buying computer parts is infinitely easier on Newegg than any B&M site, because that's what Newegg does. They have more computer parts than Amazon, not less, but they sort and filter and organize it much much better.
I think Amazon just doesn't care about people who are shopping for items with very exact specificationd in mind. It's an edge case for them. Most people go to Amazon when they want "a tv" or "a teapot".
Whenever I need something specific, I just look up "best X with Y feature review". Almost always I get an Amazon link to the type of thing I was looking for.
For both Amazon and the shopper, most results subtract from the utility of the experience.
The incentives problem is that:
- For vendor, more hits == benefit.
- For Amazon, irrelevant search == small cost, fix == high effort.
- For shopper, irrelevant search == high cost, switching retailers == low cost
The equilibrium point is shitty Amazon search.
Is this backward?
For a shopper, not being able to find what you want (or trust what you find) is a high cost.
The cost of switching to another site, or shopping mode, is low.
More to the point: it's vastly lower than the shopper being able to effectively fix Amazon's search.
This is a general principle of networks and positive- vs. negative-value members or additions.
The naive Metcalf's Law notion, that all members of a network are a net positive, is false, and even the far more useful Tilly-Odlyzko formulation (V = nlog(n)) fails to account for nodes contributing a negative cost. Since all* information imposes an attention cost, you can approximate the actual network value as:
V = n*log(n) - k*n
In fact the size of the network is determined by the cost constant. The lower the constant, the larger the sustainable network size.
At some point, adding more members reduces total network value. Worse, since you have high-value and low-value contributors, and quite possibly a higher value-sensitivity of high-value members, as the network value approaches and passes the zero point, high-value members tend to defect. That's what happens as a social network tends to low-quality posts, content, and discussion.
Or a shopping market tends to counterfeit goods, mislabeled content, fraud and the like.
Just as MySpace found itself walking dead, and numerous earlier retail establishments, Amazon could find itself on the wrong side of this line and quickly.
Also: though I represent k as a constant, it's better to think of it at any given point in time as being mostly undifferentiated amongst nodes. But over time that constant might increase or decrease, whether due to the behaviour of nodes, additions or deletions in nodes, or in environmental factors.
It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too much of my money, but the site really is crap.
I don't have any real information though, other than a confirmation that it doesn't do what I want either.
I think I've noticed it not working like 5 or 6 years ago when I was shopping for shoes, if not earlier than that. Keep in mind that even without Zappos, they're in the business of selling shoes, too, and have ran some crazy promotions around shoes, too.
So I guess google just heavily filters, limits and shuffles apps so they are somewhat evenly distributed but it does look to end users like a buggy search that can't decide if it has the app or not returning different results for the same query.
Currently, it often doesn't. I don't care much about fairness for the app distributors, but I suspect the current schema is much less fair than a good search. (The phone ecosystems are all so broken, why doesn't anybody create one that works as the user says?)
They can get away with it, because we still use them, I guess.
They also have tried to specifically promote their clothes and shoe-selling business within Amazon.com, but those have especially bad interface for figuring out price and all. For example, if there are 20 colours of jeans on the same page (e.g., it's considered the same item, just in different colour), do I really have to click to each one of them to find those that are the cheapest and/or are on sale?
And the sort never working by price is just ridiculous. I think it's been like that for years, really amazing that they've never fixed it. Never works even if you select Amazon.com as the only seller.
I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.
I wish there was a way to just download the catalog and query/search/sort it myself though.
That would be nice and not entirely without precedent, since you can download some of IMDB's catalogue (owned by Amazon since 1998.) However I suspect this feature is a vestigial remnant of IMDB's earlier days on Usenet.
Have you seen the kindle software? Amazon's programmers are just comically incapable of writing the simplest things.
Hard drives are a little different in that it's not something that countless chinese companies make and is mostly differentiated by brand. There are only a handful of companies that actually make hard drives and prices are all pretty similar.
There was a recent thread post about a counterfeit external USB hard disk, though, JFYI:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019079
https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/198-chinese-magical-hard-dri...
yea and totally broken UI on mobile. not their fault though. is it time for browsers to adopt a sensible default CSS for mobile?
I just cross-checked with german "Geizhals"[1], and the 4 TB Seagate IronWolf (ST4000VN008) started at ~160€ in Sep. 2016, quickly fell to 140€ a few days later, and then slowly descended to 105€ in Jan. 2018 - and that's the region it's been sitting there for two years now. The UK price chart looks almost the same.[2]
[1]: https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008...
[2]: https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000v...
End result: Static prices.
The only time prices will change is when only one manufacturer is left and they jack the prices as a monopoly on antique tech that a few big companies still need. We're a long way from that tho.
:)) https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin
SSDs are unsuitable for long term storage, technology is simply incapable (cells losing charge, normal usage physically degrading medium, limited number or charges per cell). We dont have anything better than spinning magnetic medium at the moment, and nothing viable on the horizon.
Leave it powered up and let the controller re-write the data every year or so automatically.
>normal usage physically degrading medium
For 'read-only' data that is rewritten once per year to compensate for cells loosing charge, you can expect a lifetime over 10,000 years.
Sure, some SSD's available today wont handle the above cases properly and data will be lost, but it is not a theoretically unsolvable issue.
2 No such thing as read only SSD. Just like in ram, SSDs experience read disturbance (rowhammer) https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-read-disturb-err...
"A key contributor to this reduced reliability is read disturb, where a read to one row of cells impacts the threshold voltages of unread flash cells in different rows of the same block. Such disturbances may shift the threshold voltages of these unread cells to different logical states than originally programmed, leading to read errors that hurt endurance"
The very best SSDs today promise to go into read only mode in case of a failure, and in tests almost none are. Intel server family of drives famously brick itself despite stating "read only" in documentation.
as to the failure rates being similar, too early to tell, but to be up front the sheer performance gain even compared to heavily cached systems is amazing.
[0] https://skinflint.co.uk/?phist=486924&age=9999
[1] https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#so...
[2] https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#t=...
[Life is too short and data is too dear to ever buy one of these refurb units]
I’m a big fan of UnRaid for my server OS but I know it’s not as advanced as some offerings on the market. I enjoy it’s ease of use and management of VM’s/containers.
I’m happy to share more if you are interested.
You mean the 3.3v issue. In most cases, you can also just clip the 3.3v wire that goes to the sata power connectors from your power supply. It's orange, you won't be missing out by not having it anymore, and it's easy to clip with wire cutters. You should put a dab of electrical tape on the cut ends, but a clean cut isn't likely to short on anything. Consider it updating your power supply to the latest SATA spec.
Some people do have sata enclosures that provide 3.3v, and they may need tape on their drives, or something more drastic.
Been there, and it's worked well, but I did some research and used kapton tape. It's thin, and designed for use in electrical applications needing resistance.
> Power Disable feature allows for remote power cycling of SATA drives and a Rebuild Assist function that speeds up the rebuild process to help ease maintenance in the data center.
> The new Power Disable feature (similar to the SAS Power Disable feature) uses Pin 3 of the SATA power connector. Some legacy power supplies that provide 3.3 V power on Pin 3 would force drives with Power Disable feature to get stuck in a hard reset condition preventing them from spinning up. The problem can usually be eliminated by using a simple “Molex to SATA” power adaptor to supply power to these drives.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...
Saving 5 dollars on drives by using 30 3TB drives instead of 6 15TB drives isn't a win in terms of pricing when you consider the total cost.
So, in a sense, the same idea, but an opposite of a GP comment.
That said, this looks like a useful tool. I can accept prices from Amazon and shop around for someone who knows how to pack.
Please add Newegg and other non-Amazon vendors. Newegg has an API and everything. Around 10 - 15 years ago, I used to use a simple site called pricewatch that wasn't too far off from this.
> if you choose to display prices for any Product on your Site in any “comparison” format (including through the use of any price-comparison tool or engine) together with prices for the same or similar products offered through any web site or other means other than an Amazon Site, you must display both the lowest “new” price and, if we provide it to you, the lowest “used” price at which the Product is available on the Amazon Site.
... which implies that it's not forbidden, but I can't blame someone for not wanting to risk it.
[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/MwW9TW/western-digital-inte...
If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not just Amazon) second.
I'm curious, though, why would anyone bother with a scam like that?
I mean, it'd seem like someone with the necessary technical skills could make a larger, steadier income through honest means. So why would they waste their time/effort on something that can backfire when noticed by the returns center or the next buyer?
It certainly wouldn't surprise me if people've done this a few times -- I mean, people do all sorts of weird things -- but is it something that's happened enough to be notable?
Thats a lot of zeroes for not much effort.
I've walked out with 8 drives at once, but they usually have tons of the Elements in stock.
In Asia there are a lot of serious vendor. Sometimes B&M prices and stock availability here is very competitive with online offering.
B&M is still good for me when I can't wait for shipping or risk postal damage. It's also convenient to have a face I can look at whenever I would like to dispute something FAST. Especially disk storage products.
So I think someone in management genuinely believes suppliers will come around to supplying them goods with payment on sale, despite all evidence to the contrary
Every now and then you find someone with a conscience selling things on ebay and it is just a pleasant experience and restores some faith in humanity. That is what inspired me to sell it instead of having it collect dust in a drawer for 10 years.
For example, this one is missing:
WD 6TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive 6TB https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV
(I bought it just 1 month ago so it's not newly listed.)
Manufacturers would rather over produce high quality drives than risk not being able to fulfill orders. Eventually the surplus gets put in an external housing and rebranded for consumer use.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easy...
But I wonder, am I doing something wrong here? Or are other people just using drives in different ways (for active files or huge media libraries that they don't want to store redundantly)? I would understand that under those circumstances, failure of a single drive is more catastrophic. I don't mean to be critical here, as I'm far from an expert!
When you let the companies pick which model of disk to embed in their product, they pick the cheapest one available. Probably not what you want.
Personally, I have Zalman ZM-VE300, also no-name m.2 2280 USB 3 enclosures, both work fine. If you'll do the same, don't forget there're 2 sorts of m.2 disks, SATA and NVME, USB enclosures for them aren't compatible.
I have an old 24 tape robot I haven't used in a while. Priced out a used LTO8 drive and 24 LTO7 tapes, and assuming that they're formatted M8 to 9TB, it still costs out to $0.02/GB-- so only just breaking even with the 12TB USB3 external drives.
You need a lot of tapes before LTO starts comparing favorably to current drive prices even using LTO7 tapes. :( like 1PB before it's really attractive.
Missing some products. This is a known bug in how I'm currently importing product data from Amazon's API. Some products are listed with variations that appear on the same product page but are completely separate products in Amazon's catalog. There's no way to get the API to return all of the variations at once, so I have to perform several subrequests to enumerate those. Currently, that doesn't happen. However, I'm in the process of reworking a lot of the data import code to use the new PA-API 5.0 and am planning to make variations work properly with those changes.
Filter by products sold by Amazon. Initially, diskprices.com was set to filter out products not sold by Amazon, but I received quite a bit of feedback asking me to remove that filter as some of the best deals are from resellers. The new PA-API does have a populated Merchant field for most products, so I may try to expose that.
Display prices including shipping costs. This is addressed in the FAQ (https://diskprices.com/faq.html), but it really comes down to privacy. I'd need you to login with your Amazon account or give me your location in order to compute tax and shipping information and I really don't want the burden of handling PII.
Clicking the Back button does weird things. This is a bug. Whenever you change a filter, a bit of JavaScript updates the URL in your address bar so that you can copy/paste a link to the page you're looking at with the current filters and send it to someone. It appears I'm not capturing the Back event and updating the filters to match the address bar. I'll get this fixed soon.
External SSD category is missing. Up until the last few months, there really weren't many external SSDs for sale on Amazon, but it looks like this is definitely becoming it's own product category, so I'll add it.
Add Amazon.co.jp. Funny story, diskprices.com had support for Amazon Japan when I first launched it, but they suspended my account and sent an email telling me why, written in japanese. Google Translate couldn't make any sense of the email and I'd had some significant data quality issues with the filters, so I decided not to pursue it further. This is the first time somebody's asked for Amazon.co.jp support. I'll look into setting it up again, but Amazon's added some new restrictions on API access across all regions since then, so it's a bit more difficult to get new regions added now.
Account for per-port cost in calculating prices. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I think this feature ends up looking a lot like pcpartpicker, with a constraint solver bolted on the side... Given a set of parameters for total capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, etc, optimize for the best price/performance. I currently don't have enough metadata about most of the drives to implement this properly and it's a big feature to develop, but it's something I want to experiment with eventually.
Again, thank you all for the feedback!
edit: formatting
I got blocked on very first attempt to scrap from cloud. Literally request #1.
...with code that worked fine on residential IP five mins earlier (where I coded it).
I'm sure it can be circumvented, but that experience led me to believe it's better to just save the time and pay for a res proxy (as sketchy as that concept is)
Insecure, but probably good enough for a page like this.
IOPs, NVMe doesn’t RAID, throughput, latency, raid controllers, on hard drive DRAM cache, SAS vs SATA vs M2 vs PCI, drive writes per day, mean time between failure, specific server firmware on drive...
I’d buy anything off this list for me personally, but I’m definitely in research mode and there just isn’t enough info here. Buy on price alone!? Savages!
I love these sites. It's just sad that it's difficult-to-near-impossible to actually use Amazon (or eBay) for the exact same purpose. The perfect example hit me, yesterday. I wanted a new A/C adapter for my Thinkpad. It's a USB-C laptop, so simple, right? Start with a search. OK, there's a lot of A/C adapters, and a lot of USB-C adapters for phones. In the mix is one or two (over-priced, non-OEM) adapters.
Let's try the A/C adapters category, maybe I can click into that and filter based on the metadata? First, find the category. A few minutes later, settle on something somewhat close. This shouldn't be too difficult; this thing can be powered by anything 60W or higher that supports USB-PD and has a USB-C end on it. Nope. Not a single filter and a few thousand results are returned[1].
Product properties/metadata are so important -- why are so many important bits of data completely missing/unavailable to me while trying to find what I need? I feel like Amazon and eBay have managed to recreate the experience of shopping at a Walmart Super Center online -- a store full of products, organized by some magician, in order to make a 2 minute purchase require 20 minutes of browsing. I guess I don't have to roll the dice picking a check-out line that might move quickly, but outside of that, the experience is so bad that I have a solid four or five things I need to buy which I've attempted to find and simply given up.
And it used to be that you could find other shops online that were more narrow in their product categories (but not selection in said categories) and offered better options for filtering and finding the precise item you were looking for. Many of those are gone, now. The ones that remain all use a handful of off-the-shelf cart software and are often worse for finding products[2] or the price is so much worse that you end up finding the product and searching for its specific part number on Amazon.
I have to say, though, I clicked this link because I have been putting off purchasing an NVMe SSD drive. So thank you to whomever is responsible for this site; that was very helpful in getting me to pull the trigger.
In a more perfect world, a site designed to make it possible to filter available products by a set of incredibly important, common properties which is directly tied to the site who's job it is to sell you the actual products wouldn't even exist. In this world, it gets over 250 upvotes and has more than 160 comments after being on HN for about 13 hours.
[1] Unless, of course, I decide to sort by anything other than "Featured" whatever-the-heck-that-means, then there's 150 or so.
[2] NewEgg does a better job than Amazon, but too often a filter will eliminate a set of products because they refer to a common property of a product by a different name; I can tolerate that, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to so frequently.