I remember a company introducing a new orange flavored drink coming out with an offer where they'd give the drink for "free" in exchange for x number of oranges.
Oranges across the city sold out.
If it was just a packing problem, it's easy enough for me to ship you an empty hard drive mailing carton with pre-paid return postage.
As for SSDs, well, I'm generally more suspicious of SSDs. They are more shock resistant, but I've got north of a decade watching how hard drives fail. I've got a reasonable feel for it. SSDs? I am less familiar with. They /do/ fail just like any other drive; not only after you've written them X times. (I mean, they have that problem, too... but this idea that a ssd is more reliable because it's got no moving parts is bunk. You still need your raid.)
The problem I see is twofold.
1. if I'm buying thousands of hard drives, I can probably get 'em cheaper than you can.
and
2. if we're talking any hard drive you have laying about, (in which case, yeah, it might be 'cheaper' in that you don't want the hard drive anymore, and the effort of selling it is a large portion of it's value) well, then you have the problem of a bunch of different kinds of hard drives, which increases the complexity of your system.
Now, you could make some sort of minimum requirements (e.g. must be from vendor X, Y or Z, must be at least 7200rpm, must be at least 3tb, must be 'raid edition' etc...) and that /might/ work... it'd still be hard to overcome problem 1. (I suppose it would be a reasonable way to exploit 'loss leader' 'limit one' sales, but those are mostly for consumer-grade drives.)
By the way, Apple replaced it free of charge, outside warranty.
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512B...
Yup, looks like the samsung pro stuff also has a three year warranty.
I strongly suspect a similar market will shortly exist for aged out SSD. Once a SSD dies, simply modify its bios to report its brand new and error free, and sell it at full price on CL / ebay / etc.
I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers.
One "obvious" startup idea is no one who knows anything about RAID ever voluntarily builds an array with identical models / sequential serial numbers. However that is the only way big integrators will ship servers.
I'd be willing to eat a modest fee (aka a profit for a startup) for someone, somehow, to help me end up with an array of extremely non-identical drives. I have no idea how to work this. A swap operation? A trading site?
Maybe if you assume you want to replace an entire array every X years, and you've got Y drives, a subscription service sends you (Y/X) "currently top of the line" drives per year and you swap them in and expand the array as possible, as now unused space becomes available? There's subscription services for everything from "fruit of the month" to "mens underwear" so I think there's a possibility for raid admins to subscribe and save a new drive every 3 months or whatever, and due to labor costs of failure, businesses are not going to flip out at a somewhat higher profit margin. The killer problem with a subscription startup service like this would be customer support handing turnover at the enduser aka mailing address, and publicity. This service might exist, or existed in the past, but I've been in the biz a long time and never heard of it, so I find that highly unlikely unless the one attempt years ago was an epic fail. Aside from big biz, at least some small admins would subscribe, so don't forget about us guys with TB scale mythtv installations at home. I mirror and would like a yearly replacement cycle (because I have the dough and don't enjoy recovery as a hobby) so send me a top of the line big SATA every six months for 10%, do all the research (maybe burn-in testing) to save me the time, and I'll not blink at a "modest" markup, say under 100%.
>I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers.
I know that practice is thriving in the spinning rust market. Usually the drives are relabeled as some brand you've never heard of, but sometimes not. I've been burned when I was younger and cheaper.
(note, I've never seen a drive sold as a larger drive, as is common with SD cards... but that's 'cause filling the drive is a very standard minimum test for a hard drive. Generally speaking, these are drives with a bunch of bad sectors that are 're-mapped')
To prevent this sort of thing, standard procedure, when dealing with used drives, is to ask for the serial number. With that info, you can go to the western digital or seagate website and check the warranty status. If it's got a warranty, they probably haven't screwed with the firmware to make a bad drive look good (because why would you, when you can return it to the manufacturer and get an actual good drive.)
If the drive isn't under warranty, don't buy it unless your time is free. If your time is free, don't buy it even then, unless you trust the seller a lot and are willing to spend a lot of effort on burn-in during the period where the seller will accept returns.
Warranty service for both Seagate and western digital is very good. It doesn't matter how you got your hands on the drive; if it's within warranty, you can ship it back and they send you a working refurb (often of a newer model, if you ship back an old drive.) Same is true for initial manufacturing defects. /never/ return a drive to a retailer (unless you are getting a refund, not an exchange) - when you exchange a drive at a retailer, they just give you the drive that the last guy exchanged. Send it to the manufacturer; they actually know how to test the things.
>Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army.
Why just not eat the oranges?