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As you can imagine, we (rsync.net) buy a lot of hard drives. We use SAS drives so, unfortunately, we can't do the "buy the cheapest external USB drives from Fr
by rsync 10y ago
As you can imagine, we (rsync.net) buy a lot of hard drives.
We use SAS drives so, unfortunately, we can't do the "buy the cheapest external USB drives from Frys and strip them" trick.
However, it is very, very hard to buy a new hard drive on Amazon if it is more than a year out of introduction. After a year or so, all of the "new" drives on Amazon have widely varying SMART statistics and lifetime gauges. We very, very regularly get entire batches of "new" drives with thousands of hours of use on them.
I would really like to name and shame specific sellers but I am traveling now and can't dive into old email threads. I keep meaning to do a blog post, etc.
In egregious cases, we return/refund. Other times, if we get a big batch with sub-10k hours on them and they all pass our very strict burn-in process, we use them.
It's actually quite difficult to buy a genuinely new 4TB enterprise drive right now and in 6 months that will begin to be the case with 6-8TB drives, etc.
- detaro 10y agoIs this problem Amazon specific, or does the supply chain for other large sellers have the same issue?
- tdurden 10y agoI didn't realize how bad things were until reading this.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoThis may be a really ignorant question but can I ask why you continue to use Amazon to source hard drives then? Is there really no other place to buy hard drives? If you are a bulk buyer I would think you'd be able to buy directly from the manufacturer or something.
- rsync 10y agoWe continue to buy drives on amazon because of extremely fast and easy sourcing, checkout, and return policy. Basically the same reason everyone uses amazon, for everything. If we get a really wacko batch, the return is very, very simple. The practice of selling "new pulls" (supposedly new drives that are removed from new servers by end users that wanted different drives installed all along) is rampant everywhere - not just at Amazon. The problem is that a lot of "pulls that are not new at all and are actually just used drives" drift into that channel. And, of course, all of them are sold as "brand new".
- nommm-nommm 10y agoDo you think you are in danger of being banned from Amazon for too many returns? They have been known to do that to other buyers.