Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New
kozubik.com
kozubik.com
* I reported it to Amazon's fraud team (with evidence): No response
* I wrote the seller a bad review (also with evidence!): Taken down by Amazon
I bought a DSLR camera a few years ago on amazon, and what showed up was an old very clearly used camera with thousands of photos taken (shutter counter) and parts missing, in a torn box. Really?
I returned it, thankfully easy refund. But I wrote a matter-of-fact review, zero ranting, just stating that this vendor is selling used equipment advertised as new. Amazon immediately took the review down. They will do anything to protect the scam vendors.
I no longer buy any electronics worth more than ~$50 on amazon, I go to reputable vendors instead.
I don't buy drives on Amazon for my 9 year old's laptop because of the rampant fraud and counterfeiting, I'm shocked that they're trusted for any business use-cases by anyone moderately savvy. I'm even more shocked that the takeaway is to blame the individual seller, rather than the marketplace that makes it possible.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707 (HDD shortage)
>At rsync.net we have trusted suppliers with verified supply chains and a long history of providing reliable service.
>However, from time to time, it is expedient to purchase parts from Amazon - something we do with care and suspicion.
That seems like a very reasonable and non-crazy approach to using Amazon.
ZFS helped me discover that my motherboard SATA chip can't handle 6 drives; I had to purchase a cheap Chinese PCI Express SATA controller to communicate with my drives reliably and error-free.
However, an even more fundamental philosophy behind any work that we do is "defense in depth" which means that even after building the fault-tolerant, anti-fragile system, we also spend time and resources qualifying the inputs ...
... and then spend time and resources monitoring the outputs (error rates, failures, correlation, etc.).
Any one of those pieces is, theoretically, sufficient. Layering the pieces in a defense in depth strategy is what gives us the highly confident posture we enjoy.
> For those of you tracking the stats closely, you’ll notice that the Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB) is a frequent flier on this list. The last time it had a failure was in Q3 2024—and it was just a single failure for the whole quarter!
IMHO, it's more important to consider correlated failures rather than worry about getting the best or avoiding the worst drives. Try to avoid running an array that's built from same model, same firmware, same build time, same power on hours, same workload. Every so often, you get things like drive disappears when power on time overflows, or a manufacturing error that makes most drives fail after N weeks of use, having all of your drives in the same part of their lifecycle makes you more likely to experience a catastrophic failure that failure rate analysis wouldn't pick up.
Picking SSDs carefully bears more fruit, there are many more makers and wider variance in performance and reliability as well as characteristics during failure: everyone says SSDs go read only during failure, but my experience has been that lots of SSDs disappear from their interfaces during failure; you might reasonably have less redundancy if you have confidence the SSD will remain readable for recovery if it fails.
If you run a fully matched array, you may well get better performance, but you also may wake up one day to all your disks disappeared. There's other ways for all your disks to disappear too, but same firmware, same firmware bug feels more preventable than power supply failed very hot.
Solidigm have all their firmware available for everyone their website.
I'd have thought the fraud problems from "commingling" were well-enough known by now to avoid wanting to blame any specific Amazon Marketplace vendor, but perhaps not.
even backblaze bought drives in supermarket when there was HDD shortage
I buy drives on Amazon all the time. I check them all. Never had any problems.
The mistake they made was buying not from Amazon, but from "Maestro Technology" listing on Amazon. If you understand that Amazon is a marketplace and you take 10 seconds to read who you're buying from, it's not a problem.
Amazon returns are also extremely easy. I once gambled on a sketchy seller and received a bad product (not computer related). A couple clicks and it was on its way back for a refund.
The problems with inventory commingling are virtually a thing of the past. I went through the process of selling a product on Amazon and understanding their evolved inventory labeling and commingling procedures so I'm not worried. Many of the tech community are anchored to news articles from years ago, though.
If you have a highly trusted vendor who can deliver at great prices and have products in stock that show up at your door when you need them, then use that. For the rest of us, using Amazon to buy common parts isn't really the problem that it's made out to be in HN comments. I think a lot of people here only understand Amazon through the occasional article that makes it to the top of HN and they don't understand what it's really like because they've been too scared to use it for years.
You can't universally reset SMART data on an SSD unless you happen to have a model where factory tools are available on the internet or something.
I've worked with a vendor who were a bit fast and loose with what NAND / controller / firmware they considered "ACME SC9000" SSDs to be. Because of this, some of the drives actually had bad configurations. They gave us tools to query / reset / update the firmware on these drives. The SMART data was one of the options you could reset.
Given the number of $10 self-reporting "10TB" USB drives out there, if there's enough of a profit incentive and volume of drives, you can't rule out a SMART reset drive.
If a marketplace is prone to scammers, and is unable or unwilling to get rid of and assist in the prosecution of the scammers, then it is 100% the scammers' fault.
No, "force the seller to create yet another account" doesn't count as doing anything.
The thing you're looking for is a single line of text, often in gray color, saying "Amazon" and it's usually below the "Dispatches from Amazon" "Amazon".
Unlike Ebay, Amazon puts zero effort into making sure you know who you are buying from. If you are a first time buyer, you will not look for this one line that tells you, your risk of a scam is closer to 100% than 0%.
We don't.
"At rsync.net we have trusted suppliers with verified supply chains and a long history of providing reliable service."
...
"However, from time to time, it is expedient to purchase parts from Amazon - something we do with care and suspicion."
... and that care and suspicion takes the form of physical and logical inspections and extended part burn-in.
As you can see, this QC process caught these mis-labeled parts.
Both sellers issued refunds without trouble because I bought them under Prime. One seller seemed genuinely surprised they had a counterfeit in stock.
Both of these counterfeit drives look very, very convincingly authentic, except the serial numbers don't match real ones and don't validate as real ones with the OEM.
The first time, I actually argued with Seagate over it being real, until they pointed out that aside from the serial number not being in their databases, it's not even in the correct format for any of their drives.
If you care about your drives and you're buying on Amazon, only buy under Prime. And when they're delivered, check the serial numbers with the OEM first thing (usually via warranty validation). Don't buy anything not on Prime.
Jumping onto this, I've now had 2 experiences of buying counterfeit drives on Amazon from different sellers.
Since then, I only buy cheap crap (smartphone cases) from Amazon or things which are not available in other stores, as few as I can.
Alas, one can completely remove Sharpie writing from metal with 99% isopropyl alcohol. Did they make a better choice? This looks like Sharpie writing to me.
Alcohol/solvent resistant markers.
Thousands of hours doesn't pass the smell test. There's no way a specific SSD goes through months of testing prior to sale. A couple of hours seems reasonable though. And I'd rather it not be easy to reset the counters, so they don't reset the counters after testing during manufacturing/burn-in.
And I guess I assumed SSD cause we're on an SSD topic. I think WD uses their color branding for both types of drives though.
The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the serial number against the manufacturers database if available is also a good precaution.
These are probably things you should be doing whether or not the drive is allegedly new.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Larger-disks-wi...
SEarch Water Panther, MDD Enterprise
I did not know, per that article, that Amazon had for some time now offered motivated third-party sellers a means to avoid commingling by applying a “fulfillment network SKU” barcode to their goods. And that they estimate merchants spend $600mm a year on that type of “restickering.” Expensive, but possible.
[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2025/after-years-of-backlash-amazon...
Let's calculate: DWPD for the D3-S4510 is 2, giving TBW = 2.84*2(DWPD)*365(days)*5(years) = 10366 TB, or around 10^10 MiB (9885787963 exactly). SMART attribute NAND writes tells 3068104*32 MiB written, which is around 10^8 MiB (98179328 exactly). So, there is 99% of the drive's resource still left, if we are talking about flash wear.
The second drive's NAND writes attribute is 356474, which is 11% of that of the first drive. And it's D3-S4610, which DWPD is 3, so the writes barely scratched the surface.
Again, I am not liking scammers who sell used drives a single bit, the overall situation is getting worse, it's way harder now to buy new genuine disk drives (and electronics in general). But let's just be honest, this particular case is not bad, rsync.net got lucky.
Without it, there isn't enough incentive to try and just eat the cost of a refund in the rare case they get caught.
It is WILD that anyone in tech assumes this will come as new. Simply no one makes the same model of "consumable" for 7 years. Intel doesn't even sell Intel-branded SSDs anymore, that division was spinned off.
It's also WILD that you would trust something as sketchy sounding as "Maestro Technologies" for a mission-critical task.
I bet they were cheap though.
Intel did last orders for that drive Dec 30 2022. The article was written in April, so the author was conceivably purchasing drives that had sat on a shelf for a year and a half. That doesn't tickle alarm bells in my head.
Secondly, maybe my scam detector isn't well tuned enough, but "Maestro Technologies" doesn't seem that much stranger than "Apple" or "Micro soft" or "Zoom" or "Snap." If it were XBBHHZZZAA, LLC, maybe I'd have more room for pause.
The takeaway lesson here is that Amazon has become less and less reliable as a source for items. It's especially bad if it's purchased from a third party (something Amazon seems keen not to highlight on the purchase page), but even FBA is not free of trash. They straight up sell pirated N64 cartridges for example: https://www.amazon.com/Cartridge-Nintendo-Smash-64-Video-Ver...
Intel didn't. Solidigm did. If the author was buying the Intel drive, it was at least 4 years old since they spun SSDs out in 2021.
> Secondly, maybe my scam detector isn't well tuned enough, but "Maestro Technologies" doesn't seem that much stranger than "Apple" or "Micro soft" or "Zoom" or "Snap."
Yes, it isn't.
> The takeaway lesson here is that Amazon has become less and less reliable as a source for items.
That problem is over a decade old. Even normies I talk to are aware of it.
Firstly, the time between the SK Hynix acquisition (Dec 30 21) and the date of this article is 3 years 4 months, not "at least 4 years".
Secondly, of whether the facility was owned by Intel or Solidigm at the time the drive was manufactured, the Intel PCN states last buy dates of Dec 30 2022 here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/8055...
The *Intel* SKUs listed in the products affected table will End of life ... Please determine your remaining demand for the products listed in the "Products Affected/Intel Ordering Codes" ... While *Intel* will make commercially reasonable efforts to support last time order quantities ...
Or, as Solidigm state on their FAQ:(https://www.solidigm.com/support-page/faqs.html):
Why do some Solidigm products have *Intel labels*, order forms, and branding?
Certain business elements that were already in place or in development prior to the creation of Solidigm will continue to bear Intel labels and branding for some time.