Anecdote. I swore off spinning disks for my PC years ago, but I've been a bit cheap and recently got fed up with my 500GB "storage" drive always being near full and my work VM as well :/ So I finally went onto Google to look into storage and was absolutely, postively, shocked that I somehow missed the whole m.2 nvme surge. So much so that I got a 1TB 970 EVO for just $170. Nearly 500k random IOPS with qd32, and 3.5GB/s and 2.5GB/s sequential read/write?! Yes please.
I was even able to jump through hoops to get bitlocker working with hardware encryption, so I'm getting full disk encryption at nearly spec speeds. Awesomeness.
EDIT: It's a shame the situation with RAID controller software, drivers, and physical controllers is such a crap show ATM. Doing anything "enterprise" with them seems a bit of a cluster F ATM. Anyone know what's up with that?
> It's a shame the situation with RAID controller software, drivers, and physical controllers is such a crap show ATM. Doing anything "enterprise" with them seems a bit of a cluster F ATM. Anyone know what's up with that?
The guys making storage controller ASICs weren't really prepared to start pushing 3M+ IOPS through their entry-level products. If you want to get your money's worth of performance out of NVMe SSDs, you can't have much of an abstraction layer sitting in front of them, especially not one that translates them into SCSI devices. It also doesn't take many drives before the RAID controller's host interface is the bottleneck, because the RAID card can't go into a slot wider than PCIe x16, and most are just x8.
On the other hand, actually using that much storage performance requires a ton of software engineering effort on the application side, and quickly pushes you toward a clustered approach where a traditional RAID controller isn't all that useful. "Software Defined Storage", NVMe over Fabrics, etc. are popular because it's hard to actually keep 24 NVMe SSDs busy with just a 2P 2U server.
Which is a real shame, because 'in the hardware, with no software complexity or overhead' is exactly where encryption should live.
I wish some SSD manufacturers would get third party audits of their firmware which can say "We believe data stored on this SSD is not decryptable without an externally provided key". It ought to be pretty trivial to inspect the source to verify all keys which can derive the master key are never written to persistent storage.
I can answer this! It has nothing to do with raid controller quality so much as NVMe doesn’t go to a disk controller. It lives on the PCIe bus itself.
In IDE, SATA, SAS, you wire up to RAID. In NVMe, you skip the raid controller.
So you can still RAID, but it’s either software or some device with a “private” bus like those PCIe cards that hold 4 m2 sticks. Or IDK how others work.
I just know for Enterprise right now, you get NVMe -OR- RAID. Sucks because I had some screaming drives picked out super cheap but had to ditch them in favor of slower SAS drives. But... those slower and smaller SAS drives in RAID10 will be faster than the RAID1 NMVe plan I had.
Seems like there's enough cores available in most systems you'd want an NVMe system that you probably don't lose much doing software RAID (or pooling, in some more complex FS like ZFS).
I just found some simplistic software RAID benchmarks on Phoronix[1][2], there may be better ones (I would be interested to see how much CPU the software raid processing takes during some of these tests, even if just to confirm to myself it doesn't take much).
> was absolutely, postively, shocked that I somehow missed the whole m.2 nvme surge.
I only stay subscribed to the NewEgg emails to watch retail HDD/SSD prices. The prices always amaze me, I member paying over 100$ for a 32mb usb drive and our first HDD in a home PC was a 200 something megabyte caviar.
It makes me wonder what things will be like in another 25 years.
Does NVMe make a difference over SATA2? Isn't the latter plenty fast anyway? I've been holding off on upgrading because it doesn't seem like I'd see a benefit.
I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon. Their Fulfilled-by-Amazon (FBA) idea was quite a game changer, but the implementation with the inventory co-mingling is something that I'd much rather stay away from as a consumer.
There's been oh-so-many reports that even if you're buying from the official store of any known brand, with FBA, then you might as well still receive a knock-off, due to the inventory co-mingling issue. Have they ever resolved this for good, or is noone really bothers to even pay any attention to this anymore?
>>I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon. Their Fulfilled-by-Amazon (FBA) idea was quite a game changer, but the implementation with the inventory co-mingling is something that I'd much rather stay away from as a consumer.
As far as I know it doesn't happen in the UK at all. I have placed 200+ orders with Amazon in last year alone and haven't had any issues except for a couple deliveries which were a day late(Amazon extended my prime by a month each time). 99% of my deliveries arrive in 1 day as promised. They have exemplary customer service as well. In a way, I don't understand why you'd buy from anyone else but amazon :P
> I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon.
It is cheaper than almost every other computer store in the UK for the same parts, deliver next day and they don't tend to shaft you on delivery cost (if it costs anything at all).
Unless you are near one of the large online shops and need something delivered next day there is no other option than Amazon.
co-mingling is mostly opt-in, unless that has changed. And I doubt they are co-mingling high dollar products, nor should anyone be dumb enough to do that. You usually only co-mingle to avoid the effort of putting individual sku stickers on each item which makes sense for very low priced items.
The solution is Amazon Transparency. This is offered through their Brand Services division.
And the solution for the whole industry is the same thing with some distributed ledger or some very light centralized authority (like MAC or UPC vendor assignments) plus vendor-specific databases.
About the only thing I buy from Amazon now is books (physical used, digital new) and devices made by Amazon (a new flagship kindle every 2-2.5 years as the PPI and other hardware features get better).
Anything food/supplement related always has reviews mentioning mold, substitutions etc. Cables and electronics are often counterfeit or of questionable quality. I've seen threads here on HN about counterfeit new books. Just not worth the headache of trying to find something that you think is legit and then hoping that co-mingled products alleged to be that don't get shipped to you instead.
Once there are any customer-complaints on a given SKU then co-mingling is deactivated.
Later, sellers attempting to co-mingle inventory are provided a seller-specific SKU that is matched to the parent and they're required to use. This ties all issues on their orders back to their store.
This still requires lots of human intervention, which sucks.
Well, Amazon is the place you bought them from, they are liable for your warrany, not the manufacturer, so it should not be your problem, Amazon will have to take care of it.
My experiences with Amazon have been amazing; I bought two 1TB 970 pro's when they just came out (hella expensive), and one of them was faulty. After explaining my troubleshoot, they were like: ok, sounds like you know what you are doing, we'll send you a new one, be sure to return the one that's faulty in the next few days. I was blown away, amazing experience for me and certainly a reason for me to look at Amazon first when I need something else.
> NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives.
Be very careful even buying new drives from party vendors on Newegg. I've gotten quite a few that were advertised as new but report over 30,000 hours of power-on time.
It turns out my experience is far from unique. Basically, very few people will check the SMART data, so the vast majority of the reviews are fine. If you do happen to catch it, Newegg will of course ultimately step in and force the vendor to fix it -- but that's about it. The first vendor that scammed me appears to still be doing brisk business on the site over a year later, with mostly 4 and 5 star reviews.
I bought some "Amazon Renewed" WD/HGST 10TB He drives. They came from a sketchy seller that provides a "warranty," but the provided phone number and website didn't match. I think one was used but a different(?) sketchy used HDD seller in another state.
I'm pretty sure there's no real warranty, I have no idea where these drives even came from, I have no trust in "Amazon Renewed," and I have a fear the drives are actually a bit smaller, but run a hacked firmware. But I saved $120 on the pair, so rolling the dice...
I tried that once a couple months ago. The drive pretty much came with a head crash preinstalled. I plugged it in and it sounded like it's shredding bricks in there.
I assume the seller just sources defective drives from somewhere and directly resells them as refurbished, letting the buyer do the actual testing. I assume this must work because some drives might erroneously been marked defective when it was really a sofstware issue, or other hw problem, like faulty sata cable, mainboard, loose connection, and then obviously there are drives with minor issues, like just a few reallocated sectors, that the naive buyer might not be aware of.
Yeah, I don't know what Amazon Renewed is, but it's not consistent. I bought two renewed phones of the same model a couple weeks apart, and they came with similar but not the same packaging, and one came with a review card from the vendor, even though I bought shipped and sold by Amazon.
I forget why I stopped patronizing Central Computer, probably something to do with selection, price, and service. Newegg is an utterly hostile place to buy things these days.
Honestly, if price isn't a motivating factor CDW still exists (and if you're making large business purchases you'll definitely get better pricing).
Regions like for TV and movies. IE, they sold a drive in Asia and someone sold it to us. We do a warranty check and are told that we can't get a warranty for that drive because we're in the US.
It's worth doing a warranty check with the manufacturer as soon as you receive the drive if there's any possibility at all it might not be up and up, so that you have an opportunity to return the drive if you want to.
Even if the drive is legitimate, a vendor might sell you an OEM drive which means having to go through that vendor for warranty service instead of direct with the manufacturer. That might be too much of a hassle.
Often the drives are sold at different prices in different regions. For instance, I have a few WD Reds (NAS 24/7 grade) cheaper than Blues (consumer grade). They have the words "Not for sale outside Mainland China" in big bold writing on the label. They are usually parallel or grey market goods, in my case they were brought into Hong Kong by parallel traders who probably brought infant formula or medicine back into mainland China
Gray market: The short version is that the exact model that was purchased was intended for a different region due to price segmentation at the manufacturer/brand. The item would be genuine but the manufacturer won't support the item if the customer is outside the intended region.
DVD/BluRay implement a lot of the distribution layer of segmentation in hardware and software, but the notion exists in lots of goods, such as in the marketing of high-end watches to different countries.
I assume they got a drive that wasn't meant for their region of the. When they tried to initiate an RMA with the manufacturer, it appears they wouldn't accept it.
Setting aside the issue of counterfeits on Amazon, this is really nice. Clear, simple, functional and allows you to explore the space not just comparison shop for a specific item.
I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.
Amazon's sort just flat out doesn't work, I don't understand it, it's obviously not incompetence (and anyone can call a std lib `sort` fn on a given field anyway) so I don't understand why it's an option, why it pretends that sorting by price is something that you can do.
It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too much of my money, but the site really is crap.
I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom sort by price has never worked!
They also have tried to specifically promote their clothes and shoe-selling business within Amazon.com, but those have especially bad interface for figuring out price and all. For example, if there are 20 colours of jeans on the same page (e.g., it's considered the same item, just in different colour), do I really have to click to each one of them to find those that are the cheapest and/or are on sale?
And the sort never working by price is just ridiculous. I think it's been like that for years, really amazing that they've never fixed it. Never works even if you select Amazon.com as the only seller.
I was at an Amazon all-hands years ago (I haven't worked there for years) and I saw an employee ask Bezos what Amazon was going to do about the poor quality of search. Bezos brushed off the criticism and said the search team did good work.
I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.
The best I can figure is that Amazon sort by price is using the lowest price from any new offer, even after you've narrowed to a specific seller. It might be some grades of used as well. It's also likely that the prices are periodically refreshed for the index, not live.
I don't have any real information though, other than a confirmation that it doesn't do what I want either.
Trying to buy any specifically-indicated item, outside possibly books, is a clusterfudge.
Amazon's particularly bad, though few retailers are much better.
An advantage of going directly to a manufacturer or B&M retailer's page is actually the reduced set of possible products. You still get irrelevant results, but vastly fewer.
Finding and buying computer parts is infinitely easier on Newegg than any B&M site, because that's what Newegg does. They have more computer parts than Amazon, not less, but they sort and filter and organize it much much better.
I think Amazon just doesn't care about people who are shopping for items with very exact specificationd in mind. It's an edge case for them. Most people go to Amazon when they want "a tv" or "a teapot".
Whenever I need something specific, I just look up "best X with Y feature review". Almost always I get an Amazon link to the type of thing I was looking for.
It's also a nightmare to search for a HDD of a certain size. Other sizes of HDDs will be mixed in, no matter how you search. Same thing for TVs of a certain size.
Have there been any cases of counterfeit hard drives? I have heard of USB drives rigged to report incorrect free space, but I haven't heard of the same for hard drives.
Hard drives are a little different in that it's not something that countless chinese companies make and is mostly differentiated by brand. There are only a handful of companies that actually make hard drives and prices are all pretty similar.
Hard disks (multi-platter/multi head) can be refurbished in many cases by deactivating a head or a couple (a platter) of course re-labeling it to a lower capacity, I think it was a thing in non first-world markets.
There was a recent thread post about a counterfeit external USB hard disk, though, JFYI:
This is why you have to rely on third party services to perform advanced search and filtering.
Pangoly and PCPartPicker do that exact job with advanced filtering, eg: https://pangoly.com/en/browse/ram
> Setting aside the issue of counterfeits on Amazon, this is really nice. Clear, simple, functional and allows you to explore the space not just comparison shop for a specific item.
yea and totally broken UI on mobile. not their fault though. is it time for browsers to adopt a sensible default CSS for mobile?
I find it interesting how stable HDDs are in terms of price.
I just cross-checked with german "Geizhals"[1], and the 4 TB Seagate IronWolf (ST4000VN008) started at ~160€ in Sep. 2016, quickly fell to 140€ a few days later, and then slowly descended to 105€ in Jan. 2018 - and that's the region it's been sitting there for two years now. The UK price chart looks almost the same.[2]
In 2011 I bought a 2TB WD for around £50[0], and barring some pricing oddities on that particular drive as it went out of production you can still buy 2TB drives for around £50-60[1] with £60 being where the price should be with the rate of inflation. Higher capacity drives are nice for convenience but it is a bit of a shame that the price per gigabyte hasn't really come down much[2], especially as now a single disk failure can cause 3-4 times as much data loss as it would have done around a decade ago.
Nobody puts any R&D into new drive technologies. If demand drops, factories close since they are producing at near zero margin. All R&D costs are already amortized or written off.
End result: Static prices.
The only time prices will change is when only one manufacturer is left and they jack the prices as a monopoly on antique tech that a few big companies still need. We're a long way from that tho.
SSDs are unsuitable for long term storage, technology is simply incapable (cells losing charge, normal usage physically degrading medium, limited number or charges per cell). We dont have anything better than spinning magnetic medium at the moment, and nothing viable on the horizon.
At least [edit:] three of the 4TB drives I checked was categorized as "new" but was in fact reburbished ("with a new warranty"). One of them was pretty shady about hiding this fact.
[Life is too short and data is too dear to ever buy one of these refurb units]
If you are trying to build a NAS or similar then my suggestion is go with shucked WD EasyStore externals, you need to either use molex to sata power to bypass the 2.2v issue or tape the pin but they are WD Whites inside and work very well from my experience. I just keep waiting for the 14TB's to fall a little further so I can replace one of my 5TB parity drives with that so I can grow my array.
> you need to either use molex to sata power to bypass the 2.2v issue or tape the pin
You mean the 3.3v issue. In most cases, you can also just clip the 3.3v wire that goes to the sata power connectors from your power supply. It's orange, you won't be missing out by not having it anymore, and it's easy to clip with wire cutters. You should put a dab of electrical tape on the cut ends, but a clean cut isn't likely to short on anything. Consider it updating your power supply to the latest SATA spec.
Some people do have sata enclosures that provide 3.3v, and they may need tape on their drives, or something more drastic.
:headsmack: I couldn’t remember the right voltage and I googled “2.2v” and I found a few reddit threads and assumed that was correct. 3.3v is the right number, thank you for correcting me. Yeah I bought some tape to cover the pin if needed but I found the molex cables to be easier, I didn’t know you could just cut the wire, I feel stupid now lol.
Been there, and it's worked well, but I did some research and used kapton tape. It's thin, and designed for use in electrical applications needing resistance.
Yep, I’ve got a few rolls of Kapton tape sitting next to my desk. I haven’t used it yet since I just used the Molex to Sata cables for all my shucked whites.
I believe this issue is only for certain NAS devices, or maybe only certain versions of the drives. For reference, my Synology DS2015xs didn't require any modifications to the four 10TB WD EasyStore drives I shucked that I grabbed from BestBuy.
> Power Disable feature allows for remote power cycling of SATA drives and a Rebuild Assist function that speeds up the rebuild process to help ease maintenance in the data center.
> The new Power Disable feature (similar to the SAS Power Disable feature) uses Pin 3 of the SATA power connector. Some legacy power supplies that provide 3.3 V power on Pin 3 would force drives with Power Disable feature to get stuck in a hard reset condition preventing them from spinning up. The problem can usually be eliminated by using a simple “Molex to SATA” power adaptor to supply power to these drives.
I don’t think I’ve heard of this. It’s only the power that the cable is providing and I’ve been running for months if not 1-2 years without issue using this setup.
I might not be the best person to ask. I’m running 3 servers at home currently that are all desktop towers. With a 3->4 (3x5.25”->4x3.5” [0]) converter I can fit 12 drives in each tower. Across all 3 I have just over 150TB. There are some nice server chassis that can handle 20 but I’m more comfortable with tower hardware and when I hear “SAS backplate” my eyes glaze over...
I’m a big fan of UnRaid for my server OS but I know it’s not as advanced as some offerings on the market. I enjoy it’s ease of use and management of VM’s/containers.
What country is that if you don’t mind my asking? Unfortunately, in the USA shucked are often cheaper than bare. I wish bare were cheaper b/c you void the warranty when you shuck..
From a Gamers Nexus news video near the start of the year - apparently some of these companies shifted some production to RAM due to high demand from new consoles and high end phones.
Anyone know of one that can display a sorted price per GB _with an offset_? E.g. so you can put in a marginal cost per additional SATA port and get corrected figures?
Saving 5 dollars on drives by using 30 3TB drives instead of 6 15TB drives isn't a win in terms of pricing when you consider the total cost.
Readit News
I was even able to jump through hoops to get bitlocker working with hardware encryption, so I'm getting full disk encryption at nearly spec speeds. Awesomeness.
EDIT: It's a shame the situation with RAID controller software, drivers, and physical controllers is such a crap show ATM. Doing anything "enterprise" with them seems a bit of a cluster F ATM. Anyone know what's up with that?
The guys making storage controller ASICs weren't really prepared to start pushing 3M+ IOPS through their entry-level products. If you want to get your money's worth of performance out of NVMe SSDs, you can't have much of an abstraction layer sitting in front of them, especially not one that translates them into SCSI devices. It also doesn't take many drives before the RAID controller's host interface is the bottleneck, because the RAID card can't go into a slot wider than PCIe x16, and most are just x8.
On the other hand, actually using that much storage performance requires a ton of software engineering effort on the application side, and quickly pushes you toward a clustered approach where a traditional RAID controller isn't all that useful. "Software Defined Storage", NVMe over Fabrics, etc. are popular because it's hard to actually keep 24 NVMe SSDs busy with just a 2P 2U server.
I wish some SSD manufacturers would get third party audits of their firmware which can say "We believe data stored on this SSD is not decryptable without an externally provided key". It ought to be pretty trivial to inspect the source to verify all keys which can derive the master key are never written to persistent storage.
In IDE, SATA, SAS, you wire up to RAID. In NVMe, you skip the raid controller.
So you can still RAID, but it’s either software or some device with a “private” bus like those PCIe cards that hold 4 m2 sticks. Or IDK how others work.
I just know for Enterprise right now, you get NVMe -OR- RAID. Sucks because I had some screaming drives picked out super cheap but had to ditch them in favor of slower SAS drives. But... those slower and smaller SAS drives in RAID10 will be faster than the RAID1 NMVe plan I had.
I just found some simplistic software RAID benchmarks on Phoronix[1][2], there may be better ones (I would be interested to see how much CPU the software raid processing takes during some of these tests, even if just to confirm to myself it doesn't take much).
1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-...
2: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418...
I only stay subscribed to the NewEgg emails to watch retail HDD/SSD prices. The prices always amaze me, I member paying over 100$ for a 32mb usb drive and our first HDD in a home PC was a 200 something megabyte caviar.
It makes me wonder what things will be like in another 25 years.
SATA1 - 1.5Gb/s SATA2 - 3.0Gb/s SATA3 - 6.0Gb/s
SATA3 is often referred to as SATA6G although because of 8b/10b encoding overhead you a SATA6G link maxes out at 4.8Gb/s
There are many NVMe SSDs that use 4 lanes of PCI-E Gen 3 which is just under 32Gb/s
If you read this review you can see read speeds of 3500MB/s which is 28Gb/s or just under the 32Gb/s limit.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13761/the-samsung-970-evo-plu...
I am using lowercase "b" for bit and capital "B" for byte
Remember that motherboard RAID isn't RAID if your motherboard dies. You might as well do software RAID.
Edit: Oh right, probably TRIM problems.
NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives. Provantage is another reputable vendor that usually has decent prices.
If you're local to the SF bay area, check out Central Computers. King Star USA also works if you're a business customer making a large purchase.
There's been oh-so-many reports that even if you're buying from the official store of any known brand, with FBA, then you might as well still receive a knock-off, due to the inventory co-mingling issue. Have they ever resolved this for good, or is noone really bothers to even pay any attention to this anymore?
As far as I know it doesn't happen in the UK at all. I have placed 200+ orders with Amazon in last year alone and haven't had any issues except for a couple deliveries which were a day late(Amazon extended my prime by a month each time). 99% of my deliveries arrive in 1 day as promised. They have exemplary customer service as well. In a way, I don't understand why you'd buy from anyone else but amazon :P
It is cheaper than almost every other computer store in the UK for the same parts, deliver next day and they don't tend to shaft you on delivery cost (if it costs anything at all).
Unless you are near one of the large online shops and need something delivered next day there is no other option than Amazon.
And the solution for the whole industry is the same thing with some distributed ledger or some very light centralized authority (like MAC or UPC vendor assignments) plus vendor-specific databases.
Anything food/supplement related always has reviews mentioning mold, substitutions etc. Cables and electronics are often counterfeit or of questionable quality. I've seen threads here on HN about counterfeit new books. Just not worth the headache of trying to find something that you think is legit and then hoping that co-mingled products alleged to be that don't get shipped to you instead.
Later, sellers attempting to co-mingle inventory are provided a seller-specific SKU that is matched to the parent and they're required to use. This ties all issues on their orders back to their store.
This still requires lots of human intervention, which sucks.
My experiences with Amazon have been amazing; I bought two 1TB 970 pro's when they just came out (hella expensive), and one of them was faulty. After explaining my troubleshoot, they were like: ok, sounds like you know what you are doing, we'll send you a new one, be sure to return the one that's faulty in the next few days. I was blown away, amazing experience for me and certainly a reason for me to look at Amazon first when I need something else.
Be very careful even buying new drives from party vendors on Newegg. I've gotten quite a few that were advertised as new but report over 30,000 hours of power-on time.
It turns out my experience is far from unique. Basically, very few people will check the SMART data, so the vast majority of the reviews are fine. If you do happen to catch it, Newegg will of course ultimately step in and force the vendor to fix it -- but that's about it. The first vendor that scammed me appears to still be doing brisk business on the site over a year later, with mostly 4 and 5 star reviews.
Don't buy from https://www.newegg.com/TEKDEALZ to start with.
I'm pretty sure there's no real warranty, I have no idea where these drives even came from, I have no trust in "Amazon Renewed," and I have a fear the drives are actually a bit smaller, but run a hacked firmware. But I saved $120 on the pair, so rolling the dice...
I assume the seller just sources defective drives from somewhere and directly resells them as refurbished, letting the buyer do the actual testing. I assume this must work because some drives might erroneously been marked defective when it was really a sofstware issue, or other hw problem, like faulty sata cable, mainboard, loose connection, and then obviously there are drives with minor issues, like just a few reallocated sectors, that the naive buyer might not be aware of.
Honestly, if price isn't a motivating factor CDW still exists (and if you're making large business purchases you'll definitely get better pricing).
It's worth doing a warranty check with the manufacturer as soon as you receive the drive if there's any possibility at all it might not be up and up, so that you have an opportunity to return the drive if you want to.
Even if the drive is legitimate, a vendor might sell you an OEM drive which means having to go through that vendor for warranty service instead of direct with the manufacturer. That might be too much of a hassle.
DVD/BluRay implement a lot of the distribution layer of segmentation in hardware and software, but the notion exists in lots of goods, such as in the marketing of high-end watches to different countries.
I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.
It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too much of my money, but the site really is crap.
They also have tried to specifically promote their clothes and shoe-selling business within Amazon.com, but those have especially bad interface for figuring out price and all. For example, if there are 20 colours of jeans on the same page (e.g., it's considered the same item, just in different colour), do I really have to click to each one of them to find those that are the cheapest and/or are on sale?
And the sort never working by price is just ridiculous. I think it's been like that for years, really amazing that they've never fixed it. Never works even if you select Amazon.com as the only seller.
I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.
I don't have any real information though, other than a confirmation that it doesn't do what I want either.
Have you seen the kindle software? Amazon's programmers are just comically incapable of writing the simplest things.
Amazon's particularly bad, though few retailers are much better.
An advantage of going directly to a manufacturer or B&M retailer's page is actually the reduced set of possible products. You still get irrelevant results, but vastly fewer.
Less is more.
Finding and buying computer parts is infinitely easier on Newegg than any B&M site, because that's what Newegg does. They have more computer parts than Amazon, not less, but they sort and filter and organize it much much better.
I think Amazon just doesn't care about people who are shopping for items with very exact specificationd in mind. It's an edge case for them. Most people go to Amazon when they want "a tv" or "a teapot".
Whenever I need something specific, I just look up "best X with Y feature review". Almost always I get an Amazon link to the type of thing I was looking for.
Hard drives are a little different in that it's not something that countless chinese companies make and is mostly differentiated by brand. There are only a handful of companies that actually make hard drives and prices are all pretty similar.
There was a recent thread post about a counterfeit external USB hard disk, though, JFYI:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019079
https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/198-chinese-magical-hard-dri...
yea and totally broken UI on mobile. not their fault though. is it time for browsers to adopt a sensible default CSS for mobile?
I just cross-checked with german "Geizhals"[1], and the 4 TB Seagate IronWolf (ST4000VN008) started at ~160€ in Sep. 2016, quickly fell to 140€ a few days later, and then slowly descended to 105€ in Jan. 2018 - and that's the region it's been sitting there for two years now. The UK price chart looks almost the same.[2]
[1]: https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008...
[2]: https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000v...
[0] https://skinflint.co.uk/?phist=486924&age=9999
[1] https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#so...
[2] https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#t=...
End result: Static prices.
The only time prices will change is when only one manufacturer is left and they jack the prices as a monopoly on antique tech that a few big companies still need. We're a long way from that tho.
:)) https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin
SSDs are unsuitable for long term storage, technology is simply incapable (cells losing charge, normal usage physically degrading medium, limited number or charges per cell). We dont have anything better than spinning magnetic medium at the moment, and nothing viable on the horizon.
[Life is too short and data is too dear to ever buy one of these refurb units]
You mean the 3.3v issue. In most cases, you can also just clip the 3.3v wire that goes to the sata power connectors from your power supply. It's orange, you won't be missing out by not having it anymore, and it's easy to clip with wire cutters. You should put a dab of electrical tape on the cut ends, but a clean cut isn't likely to short on anything. Consider it updating your power supply to the latest SATA spec.
Some people do have sata enclosures that provide 3.3v, and they may need tape on their drives, or something more drastic.
Been there, and it's worked well, but I did some research and used kapton tape. It's thin, and designed for use in electrical applications needing resistance.
> Power Disable feature allows for remote power cycling of SATA drives and a Rebuild Assist function that speeds up the rebuild process to help ease maintenance in the data center.
> The new Power Disable feature (similar to the SAS Power Disable feature) uses Pin 3 of the SATA power connector. Some legacy power supplies that provide 3.3 V power on Pin 3 would force drives with Power Disable feature to get stuck in a hard reset condition preventing them from spinning up. The problem can usually be eliminated by using a simple “Molex to SATA” power adaptor to supply power to these drives.
I’m a big fan of UnRaid for my server OS but I know it’s not as advanced as some offerings on the market. I enjoy it’s ease of use and management of VM’s/containers.
I’m happy to share more if you are interested.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGZ42SM
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...
Saving 5 dollars on drives by using 30 3TB drives instead of 6 15TB drives isn't a win in terms of pricing when you consider the total cost.