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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the cheapest anyway.

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.

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Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.

BestBuy will price match Amazon. So getting the real deal sounds better.

You local Best Buy will also probably have 5 hard disks total. The chances of getting exactly what you want (looking at the list in the linked site) is minimal.

Hard Disks sure, but I've gotten a reasonable choice of SSD's even one that was faster than any SSD I've owned thus far.

It's really easy for Best Buy to stock Samsung SSDs and therefore offer you something faster than anything else you've ever owned. But that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying by at least $40/TB compared to a good Amazon or Newegg price on an almost-as-fast drive from a smaller brand.

It wasn't a Samsung SSD, I don't really buy Samsung since it seems overpriced and overhyped most of the time, unless I catch a sweet deal. I had bought a Sandisk that was actually more performant than I anticipated, it was noticeable immediately after installing Linux on it.

Nah, your local Best Buy is the best place to buy shuckable WD drives on sale. You can get 8TB for $120 pretty easily.

I've walked out with 8 drives at once, but they usually have tons of the Elements in stock.

Those applies for only shitty B&Ms.

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.

If possible, Micro Center or Frys. Frys is somehow profitable but with dwindling stock at every California/Nevada location I’ve been to recently (maybe an indicator of higher prices?), but Micro Center is great.

There was a big thread about Fry’s a few weeks ago. Apparently the story behind the empty shelves is they’re having contract issues with suppliers.

That's the line they're giving out, anyway. I'm curious to see if it's just a ruse to keep some employees around and keep customers coming in paying full price as they clear the shelves before something else like complete shutdown.

It's weird, the shelves are as empty as you could hope for in a liquidation scenario and there's just crap left. Continuing to pay rent to try get rid of a few hard to sell pieces of old tech or low value items like phone cases is definitely past the point of being sensible.

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

I suspect they actually own some of their buildings and have for some time, starting from way back when property values and mortgages were lower. Or at least "own" in the usual sense of being the owner of the mortgage. Which would maybe? give them a few months more comfort zone in that they aren't paying that extra margin of current market rents to a landlord, at least in those cases where they own.

Ya, contract issues for a very specific reason. They are trying to switch to a full "consignment" model. So they want the manufacturers to give them all the inventory for free and they'll just return what doesn't sell later. So manufacturers are likely very disinterested in that model.

Disagree about the local stores part, but yeah for specific areas like electronics I always go for a more trustworthy site (like NewEgg, Jet or sometimes Best Buy). Prices are usually the same as Amazon, and if not they will almost always price match.

IDK, I suspect newegg reviews are equally gamed. Fundamentally, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that product reviews are worth the price the consumer paid for them: typically zero.

At least there’s no counterfeit products.

There are near-death drives being sold as new by third-party sellers on Newegg and all they'll do is step in and fix your order if you complain.

For electronics at least I can't remember the last time user reviews drove my purchase. I always look at specs/benchmarks, reviews on tech sites etc., and then go to the vendor with a fair idea of what I want.

Buying an internal hard drive from Amazon is extremely fraught, but I'm not aware of similar problems for internal SSDs. And they are definitely one of the most reliable places to get good prices for consumer retail SSD models.

I guess SSDs are less sensitive to environments

While nobody counterfeits mechanical drives, you can still get screwed buying "refurbs"/"tested only, like new" and similar "deals". SMART data can, and is often reset, making 3 year old >30K hour drives pulled from storage racks report mere couple power on counts and less than hour total lifetime run time.

Sometimes you can also run into situations where someone returned an external hard drive, but they swapped the drive inside with a cheap low capacity drive (like a 500gb drive put into an 8tb drive enclosure)

That's not a particularly scary scenario when buying from, e.g., Amazon.com, as it'd seem like the unit could just be returned for not being the advertised product.

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?

This was done a bit with microsd cards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D6tYBX8vE

https://www.newsweek.com/22-year-old-allegedly-scammed-amazo...

Thats a lot of zeroes for not much effort.

You can also get screwed for "new" drives. It depends on whether Amazon gates "new" sales of hard drives and even then, there are likely people gaming the system to get un-gated to sell them. All it takes is the original box and some shrink wrap to make a refurbished drive "new".

I’d buy a lot of things used but never a harddrive or any storage/backup media. Not sure if these are countereit though, I’ve never seen any bootlegs sold as used ever..

I probably wouldn't do it either. Though I recently sold my WD Red NAS HD on ebay. Someone made a really good purchase with it. They got it for half price with the original purchase receipt and 1.5 years warranty left.

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.

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