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Comment by greggh | Hacker News Reader

This has been going on for awhile. But my question for the crowd here: I actually need a bunch more storage soon, and can't afford to spend much. So while this is an obvious scam, what isn't? Got any links to the best price for the most space?

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Not sure on exact products but I'd probably trust B&H [1] over Amazon and Newegg for something like this - if you're worried about getting fake products etc.

In my experience they run a great store. I also don't think they have the kind of third-party seller BS that Amazon and Walmart do.

[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/

B&H are great. I've had good luck with them. My main supplier these days is Best Buy. No 3rd party sellers. Never heard of any scam or inauthentic products from them. They ship from the local store or warehouse so I get things faster than Prime. And maybe they treat their workers better than Amazon? I guess that's a low bar to clear but I haven't heard any complaints.

It's a little funny to me because as recently as the early 2010s, Best Buy felt like a joke. I don't know that they've changed much from then to now, but Amazon and Newegg are shadows of what they used to be. Best Buy seems like a paragon of reliability in comparison.

This mirrors my journey exactly. BB was pretty much a joke for most of the last decade+, however in the last few years it's been a bastion of reliability in a sea of fakes from its competitors.

I second B&H. Adorama[0] is a nice counterpart as well.

[0] https://www.adorama.com/

I use the hard drive category on pcpartpicker.com, sorted by price per GB. You can then filter by seller and total size if you have other constraints.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#sort=...

Also be sure to check external drives. Sometimes it's cheaper to buy one of those and then discard the enclosure.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/external-hard-drive/#sort=...

If shopping on Amazon, the trick is to view only products sold by Amazon, not 3rd party sellers. Sometimes this is a little tricky to do. When you search for "1TB USB Flash Drive", you won't see a filter for seller. But if you click "USB Flash Drives" under the department filter, you'll now be able to show only items sold by "amazon.com". Results are the legit brands: SanDisk, Kingston, HP, PNY.

> If shopping on Amazon, the trick is to view only products sold by Amazon, not 3rd party sellers.

My understanding is that "ships from and sold by Amazon.com" is not safe, since those items are often commingled into the general FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) stock.

I've seen reports of that but never had an issue myself. If there is a problem you can return it, and I find Amazon's "drop item at UPS store without packaging it" very convenient. If you still want to avoid the chance, B&H is probably best for electronic items.

I run https://diskprices.com/ which indexes Amazon. I do my best to filter out the obvious scams.

You need to be more specific about your requirements. What size is a bunch? Internal or external? Flash or spinning rust?

In general stick to well known brands of whatever you're looking at. If you want to save money, then expand your knowledge of the lesser tier brands based on what people are talking about (eg r/buildapc r/buildapcsales). Make a spreadsheet of models across vendors, rather than trusting an individual vendor's search functionality. That's just a good idea anyway, to make sure you're not getting gouged by a vendor.

The scam listing under discussion doesn't even purport to have a brand name, not even a GENSYM brand. The only way you're going to get there is to search for capacity and sort by price. Don't do that.

Depends pretty wildly on your specific needs, but Best Buy has had consistently low prices on SSDs for a few years now.

You can pick up a 2TB PNY NVMe SSD for $129 right now: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/pny-xlr8-cs3030-2tb-internal-pc...

there is a reason, this is a 300-cycles endurance drive.

Stick with the name brands, look at SlickDeals or r/pcdeals for daily deals, and assume any off-brand hardware is a scam.

I think newegg is still honest.

Sadly no, they have the "marketplace" problem that Amazon does where you never know who actually provided the widget you are buying, and they have a an even worse problem where they scam people out of returns.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/after-allegations-of-knowi...

Newegg has the same problem as all the other big online retailers, third party sellers.

newegg is extremely shady. back when GPUs were still hard to find they were bundling them with defective gigabyte power supplies (as revealed by gamer's nexus), reselling returned defective items and blaming the customer (as revealed by gamer's nexus, etc.

I wouldn't give them my money, personally. Their willingness to sell garbage to customers and blame the customers is not the mark of a good business.

Newegg is a shitshow. Same problem.

I won’t buy from them anymore. It’s just worse Amazon.

Newegg has actual product categorization, Amazon doesn't.

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