How Not to Buy a SSD
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andrei.xyz
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.
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.
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.
Windows is….. significantly more challenging.
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.
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.
https://twit.tv/shows/security-now
Long Live Steve Gibson
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.
https://www.sostocked.com/amazon-commingled-inventory/#pros-...
- 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.
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.
Thankfully got my money back.
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.
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".
My current car has a traditional steel-can filter. I cut those open after oil changes to inspect for debris.
All of that stuff I buy now from BH or Adorama.
* verified the un-advertised compatibility between an accessory and the device I was buying it for (hours of googling had not been able to confirm this for me)
* explained their personal experience with both the Sony and Canon cameras I was considering
* nearly price-matched another vendor’s sale on a large purchase of Dell monitors
They have their own warehouses with real physical stock ordered directly from suppliers, (no drop shipping and no third party sellers.) One order I received even came with a hand written note signed by the salesman who’d help me select it. A nice touch, but impossible for an operation at Amazon scale.
These days B&H is my preferred vendor for PCs+components, AV gear, SMB network equipment.
They obviously replaced it no problem but it highlighted they were either still mixing stock or were using a dodgy supplier themselves.
Note it's actually commingled - it's not a typo despite looking like one.
I'm noticing an increasing number of brands who don't have an official Amazon presence, probably for that reason.
I’ve never had it take more than a quick chat to get a full refund for anything I’ve been dissatisfied with.
That’s part of the appeal, for me - there’s no risk of being scammed by poor quality items - because you can always just get your money back and buy something else. And with free two day shipping, sometimes even one day, it hardly even registers as an inconvenience. They just make it so easy.
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 can find the same or better prices (including shipping) from other suppliers.
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.
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.
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.
I live in a city where McDonalds shut down because the local burger place was more popular.
I have spent my whole life not supporting big companies, I have been running those small local businesses myself. And I'm pretty tired of the 20-year olds coming there with the usual "It's the year 1999, this is the future, keep up!".
yawn get off my lawn.
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 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.
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.
> 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"...
But you know what I find even faster? Not having to process a return in the first place because I actually got what I ordered and it wasn't cheap bullshit or counterfeits.
Plus it seems like half the time I'm dealing with their support because they just failed to actually seal the bubble mailer. So that two day shipping that actually took three days to show up really took me nearly a week because of their inability to actually mail things properly. 30% of my orders over the last few years have been this exact problem.
In the end sure, their support is pretty good and fast. But I've had to get their support on over half the orders I've placed with them because the item arrived damaged, the item was clearly used but sold as new, the item was a fake/knockoff, or I ended up with an empty bubble mailer on my doorstep that was clearly never sealed.
Meanwhile I haven't had to interact with support on any of the other online retailers I've used, and I placed way more non-Amazon orders than Amazon orders.
For me, it's just physical books, basically.
Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
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?
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!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
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 purchased 10 genuine new from a verified vendor and 6 had to be RMA’d within the first year.
Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
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.
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?
It was 2 years ago.. so thats all i have :-P
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.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
(the title is also ~p~fun)
It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
I don't have a VPN to test, but I did ask ChatGPT [1] to try browsing it from its IP and it also failed. Afterwards I asked it to tell me what it sees from https://icanhazip.com, and it returned `74.7.36.81`, which is in London according to [2]
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/e/68a9670d-d44c-8008-9a78-0d89662b... [2] https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/74.7.36.81
I have a 10 year old Intel one in one of my machines and it's still 95% health.
I got my enterprise SSDs (1.6TB, 3DWPD, drawback: SAS3) from our Craigslist-equivalent. First I got 2 for 150€ and had a nice chat with the seller, who seems to had a big box of these. A week later he offered me his remaining 3 disks for another 150€. On eBay it seems you have to make offers.
Some local info: I also noticed on the German eBay getting Chinese cards to be much more expensive than on eBay in the US. The same seller asking 80€ or 100€ for the same LSI 9400. However, finding the article on eBay.com and then using the item ID on eBay.de allowed me to get it for the better price.
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.
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.
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".
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:
Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Read (up to): 550 MB/s
Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Write (up to): 500 MB/s
Random Read (100% Span): 85000 IOPS
Random Write (100% Span): 48000 IOPS
Sustained sequential read: up to 250 MB/s
Sustained sequential write: up to 170 MB/s
Random 4 KB reads: >35,000 IOPS
Random 4 KB writes: >3,300 IOPS
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.
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?
Nope
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Contrary anecdata: I just replaced my old SSDs: 2013 64GB 20nm MLC at 19% wear level and a 2018 500GB TLC at 34% wear level. Not because they failed, but because I had the OS on a 64GB RAID1 and needed more space. Only optimization was setting "noatime".
But that's still a horrible small N, so even the comined data is essentially meaningless.
btw, I replaced them with a bunch of HGST DC SS200 1.6TB from 2018, two of which have about as much capacity as your 30 disks. The 15nm MLC NAND is rated for 3 DWPD and has a 3% wear level. The dual ported SAS3 interface is overkill for me.
I went for a 5 disk RAID6, and could replace it another 8 times while still keeping some spare change for a visit at a gourmet restaurant.
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
Quickly spot-check any USB mass storage drive for fraudulent deliberately missing storage.