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Disk Prices on Amazon

363 points by apsec112 7y ago

theamk 7y ago
This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the cheapest anyway. If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not just Amazon) second.
- rasz 7y ago
  While nobody counterfeits mechanical drives, you can still get screwed buying "refurbs"/"tested only, like new" and similar "deals". SMART data can, and is often reset, making 3 year old >30K hour drives pulled from storage racks report mere couple power on counts and less than hour total lifetime run time.
  - empyrical 7y ago
    Sometimes you can also run into situations where someone returned an external hard drive, but they swapped the drive inside with a cheap low capacity drive (like a 500gb drive put into an 8tb drive enclosure)
    - _Nat_ 7y ago
      That's not a particularly scary scenario when buying from, e.g., Amazon.com, as it'd seem like the unit could just be returned for not being the advertised product. I'm curious, though, why would anyone bother with a scam like that? I mean, it'd seem like someone with the necessary technical skills could make a larger, steadier income through honest means. So why would they waste their time/effort on something that can backfire when noticed by the returns center or the next buyer? It certainly wouldn't surprise me if people've done this a few times -- I mean, people do all sorts of weird things -- but is it something that's happened enough to be notable?
      - judge2020 7y ago
        This was done a bit with microsd cards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D6tYBX8vE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D6tYBX8vE
      - rasz 7y ago
        https://www.newsweek.com/22-year-old-allegedly-scammed-amazon-out-370k-return-shipments-filled-dirt-1452452 https://www.newsweek.com/22-year-old-allegedly-scammed-amazo... Thats a lot of zeroes for not much effort.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    You can also get screwed for "new" drives. It depends on whether Amazon gates "new" sales of hard drives and even then, there are likely people gaming the system to get un-gated to sell them. All it takes is the original box and some shrink wrap to make a refurbished drive "new".
- gjs278 7y ago
  why would anyone go to a store when you can buy it online? total nonsense. the shipping to the store puts it at just as much risk.
- paxys 7y ago
  Disagree about the local stores part, but yeah for specific areas like electronics I always go for a more trustworthy site (like NewEgg, Jet or sometimes Best Buy). Prices are usually the same as Amazon, and if not they will almost always price match.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    IDK, I suspect newegg reviews are equally gamed. Fundamentally, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that product reviews are worth the price the consumer paid for them: typically zero.
    - jraby3 7y ago
      At least there’s no counterfeit products.
      - boring_twenties 7y ago
        There are near-death drives being sold as new by third-party sellers on Newegg and all they'll do is step in and fix your order if you complain.
    - paxys 7y ago
      For electronics at least I can't remember the last time user reviews drove my purchase. I always look at specs/benchmarks, reviews on tech sites etc., and then go to the vendor with a fair idea of what I want.
- all_blue_chucks 7y ago
  Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    BestBuy will price match Amazon. So getting the real deal sounds better.
    - paxys 7y ago
      You local Best Buy will also probably have 5 hard disks total. The chances of getting exactly what you want (looking at the list in the linked site) is minimal.
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        Hard Disks sure, but I've gotten a reasonable choice of SSD's even one that was faster than any SSD I've owned thus far.
        wtallis 7y ago
        It's really easy for Best Buy to stock Samsung SSDs and therefore offer you something faster than anything else you've ever owned. But that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying by at least $40/TB compared to a good Amazon or Newegg price on an almost-as-fast drive from a smaller brand.
        giancarlostoro 7y ago
        It wasn't a Samsung SSD, I don't really buy Samsung since it seems overpriced and overhyped most of the time, unless I catch a sweet deal. I had bought a Sandisk that was actually more performant than I anticipated, it was noticeable immediately after installing Linux on it.
- wtallis 7y ago
  Buying an internal hard drive from Amazon is extremely fraught, but I'm not aware of similar problems for internal SSDs. And they are definitely one of the most reliable places to get good prices for consumer retail SSD models.
  - numpad0 7y ago
    I guess SSDs are less sensitive to environments
- tartoran 7y ago
  I’d buy a lot of things used but never a harddrive or any storage/backup media. Not sure if these are countereit though, I’ve never seen any bootlegs sold as used ever..
  - climb_stealth 7y ago
    I probably wouldn't do it either. Though I recently sold my WD Red NAS HD on ebay. Someone made a really good purchase with it. They got it for half price with the original purchase receipt and 1.5 years warranty left. Every now and then you find someone with a conscience selling things on ebay and it is just a pleasant experience and restores some faith in humanity. That is what inspired me to sell it instead of having it collect dust in a drawer for 10 years.
joshstrange 7y ago
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.
- ajphdiv 7y ago
  I think I hear /r/DataHoarder/ calling you.
  - joshstrange 7y ago
    Oh, they have me hook, line, and sinker haha. Them along with /r/homelab and /r/unraid
- numpad0 7y ago
  Shucked drives aren’t necessarily cheap, bare drives are always cheaper in my country
  - joshstrange 7y ago
    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..
- PenguinCoder 7y ago
  Looking to build an inexpensive DAS array. Any other good ideas for storage/connectivity?
  - joshstrange 7y ago
    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. I’m happy to share more if you are interested. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGZ42SM https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGZ42SM
trynumber9 7y ago
See also https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/ https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/
mgr86 7y ago
This guy posted in a thread here a few months ago about side hustles. I was tempted to start my own off of this model. It appears it’s not as easy to get started, and with a new baby I’ve been too distracted. But at the same time with a new baby it’s more tempting for the extra cash.
- ajphdiv 7y ago
  When my son was small I would put him to bed every night with a book and then sit there in the dark and wait for him to fall asleep. I had a big pillow thing that I would sit on next to the crib (it was big enough that it had back support). Well, that hour of sitting there with my laptop was always one of my most productive hours of the day. Sometimes I would just sit there even after he fell asleep and continue to work.
lvs 7y ago
I wish the entire web looked like this once again. Ah the good ol' days. Please add Newegg and other non-Amazon vendors. Newegg has an API and everything. Around 10 - 15 years ago, I used to use a simple site called pricewatch that wasn't too far off from this.
- samstave 7y ago
  Or allow submissions from people...
- samstave 7y ago
  It would also be good to have the backblaze stats linked to on here
- kcanini 7y ago
  Pricewatch still exists!
  - lvs 7y ago
    Really? pricewatch.com times out for me at the moment.
- xmichael99 7y ago
  Apparently it's against Amazon's API terms to compare with other sites. I recall years ago the guy who runs the site explained that he is only ok to compare Amazon with Amazon.
  - mcbits 7y ago
    I don't think it's against the rules, but the rules are complex and spread all over multiple places, and they're like Google in that you have no due process if someone there decides they don't like what you're doing.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      It is against the rules. If you are an e-commerce company (i.e. a competitor) or you operate a shopping comparison service, you are not allowed to use the API at all. https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/api https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/api
sleazy_b 7y ago
This website appears to be messing with my history? After clicking some filters I can't go back.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Data is beautiful.
dzhiurgis 7y ago
Missing External SSD option (also while at it, would need to add speed as it's quite important factor).
- Const-me 7y ago
  IMO it's better to make that yourself. When you let the companies pick which model of disk to embed in their product, they pick the cheapest one available. Probably not what you want. Personally, I have Zalman ZM-VE300, also no-name m.2 2280 USB 3 enclosures, both work fine. If you'll do the same, don't forget there're 2 sorts of m.2 disks, SATA and NVME, USB enclosures for them aren't compatible.
  - wtallis 7y ago
    DIY portable SSDs are great, unless you want something ruggedized/splashproof.
LeoPanthera 7y ago
See also: "Price per TB" - http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
- whatusername 7y ago
  Also because I was curious -- looks like LTO-8 is about $12.75 on newegg. Which is still keeping below disk - but only just (and ignores the cost of drives)
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    It's a pain to format LTO-7 for higher capacity in LTO-8 drives, but once you do it's only $5-$5.50 a TB
    - nullc 7y ago
      Your comment inspired me to do some math: I have an old 24 tape robot I haven't used in a while. Priced out a used LTO8 drive and 24 LTO7 tapes, and assuming that they're formatted M8 to 9TB, it still costs out to $0.02/GB-- so only just breaking even with the 12TB USB3 external drives. You need a lot of tapes before LTO starts comparing favorably to current drive prices even using LTO7 tapes. :( like 1PB before it's really attractive.
nullc 7y ago
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.
- ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
  Also, an option to penalize excessively huge drives would be nice too. For the same price per GB I'd rather buy 2 8TB drives than 1 16TB.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    It’s cheaper per TB to buy 16s rather than 2x 8 TB, or was when I did it a 2 weeks ago. The cost of more bays pushed me there more than anything.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
      Of course. What I meant is I'd like to see an option to weigh in smaller (to be exact: closer to a particular point of available capacity distribution) drive size as a positive feature for the resulting chart. So, in a sense, the same idea, but an opposite of a GP comment.
crummy 7y ago
Why is that external drives are often cheaper than internal?
- gh123man 7y ago
  I have thought about this as well. I would love someone more knowledgable to chime in - but if I had to guess it is that consumer hard drive sales have been declining a lot in recent years. Desktops are a thing of the past for your average PC user, and as a result hardware/storage upgrades. Laptops, mobile devices, and cloud storage is where it's at. No one is buying hard drives anymore except large enterprises. In order to appeal to the consumer market HDD manufacturers need a value prop to compete with cloud storage. So discounting bulk storage is the play. I am guessing that they are selling "white label" enclosed drives at a lower margin than the enterprise counterparts but still netting more in the long run.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    When I shuck drives like these, I frequently find the higher quality models of drives in there. However, I have heard that they bin their drives and the drives that don't pass muster for enterprise end up getting used in these external drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
- climb_stealth 7y ago
  I wonder if they are lesser quality or worse specs. External hard drives often don't even show the performance characteristics other than capacity on the boxes. This is different for internal drives from what I recall.
  - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
    It's actually the opposite. External hard drives are frequently made from over production of enterprise grade hard disks. [1] Manufacturers would rather over produce high quality drives than risk not being able to fulfill orders. Eventually the surplus gets put in an external housing and rebranded for consumer use. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easystore_8tb_compendium/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easy...
sn 7y ago
We stopped buying drives from Amazon when we got drives for "the wrong region" and couldn't RMA them. 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.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Drives for the wrong region? What is that?
  - Mattwmaster58 7y ago
    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.
  - sn 7y ago
    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.
  - robjan 7y ago
    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
  - cardiffspaceman 7y ago
syphilis2 7y ago
Wow, SSD prices bounced back after December. I think most people were (and still are) expecting $100/TB to be the new baseline. https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=search https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...
- Havoc 7y ago
  Think that might just be that item. Still looks pretty consistently dropping to me
- Macha 7y ago
  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.
Thorrez 7y ago
Although different in 2 ways, this reminds me of this table of RAM prices 1957-2019: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm
unlimit 7y ago
How are they getting the data? Is there a API or its plain old scraping?
mNovak 7y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  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. Less is more.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    I disagree. What is needed is focus, not "less". 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.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Amazon's goal to be the world's retailer, selling everything, creates an incentive for vendors to appear in as many search results as possible. Even if the payoff is small, it's a net positive. For both Amazon and the shopper, most results subtract from the utility of the experience. The incentives problem is that: - For vendor, more hits == benefit. - For Amazon, irrelevant search == small cost, fix == high effort. - For shopper, irrelevant search == high cost, switching retailers == low cost The equilibrium point is shitty Amazon search.
spectramax 7y ago
It is worth noting the design and density of information presented in this website - we've forgotten how to present lots of data to users because the modern trend is to pad everything with whitespace. Dense design, no frills, just a table - this is what the web needs more of.
- ejjpi 7y ago
  Clear and simple, with filtering and sorting: https://pangoly.com/en/chart/ssd https://pangoly.com/en/chart/ssd (also performance included)
toast0 7y ago
Given Amazon's system for packing items, I would not buy hard drives from them. I don't want my hard drive's retail box bouncing around all over inside the outer amazon box for however long it takes to get to me. That's a recipe for issues down the road (or immediately). That said, this looks like a useful tool. I can accept prices from Amazon and shop around for someone who knows how to pack.
mrtnmcc 7y ago
The price sorting doesn't taken into account shipping (some items aren't Amazon Prime).
kabdib 7y ago
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]
natch 7y ago
This should account for shipping prices, because sellers use them to game the system.
fireattack 7y ago
The list is not comprehensive. For example, this one is missing: WD 6TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive 6TB https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV (I bought it just 1 month ago so it's not newly listed.)
Rapzid 7y ago
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?
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  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.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    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). 1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-960-raid&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-... 2: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418-nvme-raid&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418...
sylv3r 7y ago
This works great, just need to filter the outliers ie: https://imgur.com/XHPtfqa https://imgur.com/XHPtfqa
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
I just spent a few days looking for server hard drives. IOPs, NVMe doesn’t RAID, throughput, latency, raid controllers, on hard drive DRAM cache, SAS vs SATA vs M2 vs PCI, drive writes per day, mean time between failure, specific server firmware on drive... I’d buy anything off this list for me personally, but I’m definitely in research mode and there just isn’t enough info here. Buy on price alone!? Savages!
dudeinjapan 7y ago
Please add Japan (amazon.co.jp) m(-_-)m
gnicholas 7y ago
I see a lot of folks talking about the risk of Amazon commingling and used drives. I buy drives off Amazon, but only external/new. I only uses these drives as backups, and everything is stored on multiple drives (not RAID, they're stored in different places for fire/theft security). I've been doing this for the last 20 years and have rarely had any drive errors (usually it's a partition that goes, but after reformatting it's fine). What I've found is that I outgrow the drive before it dies on me. Once I outgrow a drive, I just buy another that is twice the size and copy everything over from the old drive, which I hang onto but never use. But I wonder, am I doing something wrong here? Or are other people just using drives in different ways (for active files or huge media libraries that they don't want to store redundantly)? I would understand that under those circumstances, failure of a single drive is more catastrophic. I don't mean to be critical here, as I'm far from an expert!
synack 7y ago
Hi, this is my site. Thank you for all of the feedback! I can address a few of the issues you've raised... Missing some products. This is a known bug in how I'm currently importing product data from Amazon's API. Some products are listed with variations that appear on the same product page but are completely separate products in Amazon's catalog. There's no way to get the API to return all of the variations at once, so I have to perform several subrequests to enumerate those. Currently, that doesn't happen. However, I'm in the process of reworking a lot of the data import code to use the new PA-API 5.0 and am planning to make variations work properly with those changes. Filter by products sold by Amazon. Initially, diskprices.com was set to filter out products not sold by Amazon, but I received quite a bit of feedback asking me to remove that filter as some of the best deals are from resellers. The new PA-API does have a populated Merchant field for most products, so I may try to expose that. Display prices including shipping costs. This is addressed in the FAQ (https://diskprices.com/faq.html https://diskprices.com/faq.html), but it really comes down to privacy. I'd need you to login with your Amazon account or give me your location in order to compute tax and shipping information and I really don't want the burden of handling PII. Clicking the Back button does weird things. This is a bug. Whenever you change a filter, a bit of JavaScript updates the URL in your address bar so that you can copy/paste a link to the page you're looking at with the current filters and send it to someone. It appears I'm not capturing the Back event and updating the filters to match the address bar. I'll get this fixed soon. External SSD category is missing. Up until the last few months, there really weren't many external SSDs for sale on Amazon, but it looks like this is definitely becoming it's own product category, so I'll add it. Add Amazon.co.jp. Funny story, diskprices.com had support for Amazon Japan when I first launched it, but they suspended my account and sent an email telling me why, written in japanese. Google Translate couldn't make any sense of the email and I'd had some significant data quality issues with the filters, so I decided not to pursue it further. This is the first time somebody's asked for Amazon.co.jp support. I'll look into setting it up again, but Amazon's added some new restrictions on API access across all regions since then, so it's a bit more difficult to get new regions added now. Account for per-port cost in calculating prices. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I think this feature ends up looking a lot like pcpartpicker, with a constraint solver bolted on the side... Given a set of parameters for total capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, etc, optimize for the best price/performance. I currently don't have enough metadata about most of the drives to implement this properly and it's a big feature to develop, but it's something I want to experiment with eventually. Again, thank you all for the feedback! edit: formatting
reiichiroh 7y ago
Does this site work for amazon Canada?
Havoc 7y ago
More interested in the tech behind the website. Amazon traditionally blocks scrapping quite aggressively
- winrid 7y ago
  Well, it's not a lot of links. Few hundred maybe. I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice. Hard to parse the page still, maybe.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    >I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice. I got blocked on very first attempt to scrap from cloud. Literally request #1. ...with code that worked fine on residential IP five mins earlier (where I coded it). I'm sure it can be circumvented, but that experience led me to believe it's better to just save the time and pay for a res proxy (as sketchy as that concept is)
    - winrid 7y ago
      Wow that's impressive. One solution is to just have some random subset of your users do your scraping for you... Then send the data to the server. Insecure, but probably good enough for a page like this.
MrGilbert 7y ago
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] [1]: https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008-a1504505.html https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008... [2]: https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008-a1504505.html https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000v...
- londons_explore 7y 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.
  - rasz 7y ago
    >producing at near zero margin :)) https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin 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.
    - willis936 7y ago
      Then we don’t have anything at all. Hard drives are only acceptable at long term storage if they’re unplugged, and even then there is a significant risk that the data won’t be accessible in 50 years. If 5 years is considered long term, then SSDs are acceptable. If 20 years is considered long term, well, make sure you have a robust RAID.
krychu 7y ago
Such a great site! Love the simple design and lack of ornamentation.
Dolores12 7y ago
I believe its against TOS to provide price on your website for specific product. It could lead to amazon affiliate account ban.
thierryzoller 7y ago
I think you'd do a lot of money with referal links. I'd be a regular user. Please extend.
adriansky 7y ago
It would be nice to have sorting!
mdip 7y ago
This is the second "Find X on Amazon more easily" sites that I've come across in the last week or so (the last was a USB hub filtering site). Including eBay in the mix, it's the third such site[0]. I love these sites. It's just sad that it's difficult-to-near-impossible to actually use Amazon (or eBay) for the exact same purpose. The perfect example hit me, yesterday. I wanted a new A/C adapter for my Thinkpad. It's a USB-C laptop, so simple, right? Start with a search. OK, there's a lot of A/C adapters, and a lot of USB-C adapters for phones. In the mix is one or two (over-priced, non-OEM) adapters. Let's try the A/C adapters category, maybe I can click into that and filter based on the metadata? First, find the category. A few minutes later, settle on something somewhat close. This shouldn't be too difficult; this thing can be powered by anything 60W or higher that supports USB-PD and has a USB-C end on it. Nope. Not a single filter and a few thousand results are returned[1]. Product properties/metadata are so important -- why are so many important bits of data completely missing/unavailable to me while trying to find what I need? I feel like Amazon and eBay have managed to recreate the experience of shopping at a Walmart Super Center online -- a store full of products, organized by some magician, in order to make a 2 minute purchase require 20 minutes of browsing. I guess I don't have to roll the dice picking a check-out line that might move quickly, but outside of that, the experience is so bad that I have a solid four or five things I need to buy which I've attempted to find and simply given up. And it used to be that you could find other shops online that were more narrow in their product categories (but not selection in said categories) and offered better options for filtering and finding the precise item you were looking for. Many of those are gone, now. The ones that remain all use a handful of off-the-shelf cart software and are often worse for finding products[2] or the price is so much worse that you end up finding the product and searching for its specific part number on Amazon. I have to say, though, I clicked this link because I have been putting off purchasing an NVMe SSD drive. So thank you to whomever is responsible for this site; that was very helpful in getting me to pull the trigger. In a more perfect world, a site designed to make it possible to filter available products by a set of incredibly important, common properties which is directly tied to the site who's job it is to sell you the actual products wouldn't even exist. In this world, it gets over 250 upvotes and has more than 160 comments after being on HN for about 13 hours. [0] https://labgopher.com https://labgopher.com [1] Unless, of course, I decide to sort by anything other than "Featured" whatever-the-heck-that-means, then there's 150 or so. [2] NewEgg does a better job than Amazon, but too often a filter will eliminate a set of products because they refer to a common property of a product by a different name; I can tolerate that, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to so frequently.
justaguyhere 7y ago
Isn't it against amazon terms to show prices?

363 points by apsec112 7y ago

This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the cheapest anyway. If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not just Amazon) second.

rasz 7y ago
While nobody counterfeits mechanical drives, you can still get screwed buying "refurbs"/"tested only, like new" and similar "deals". SMART data can, and is often reset, making 3 year old >30K hour drives pulled from storage racks report mere couple power on counts and less than hour total lifetime run time.
- empyrical 7y ago
  Sometimes you can also run into situations where someone returned an external hard drive, but they swapped the drive inside with a cheap low capacity drive (like a 500gb drive put into an 8tb drive enclosure)
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    That's not a particularly scary scenario when buying from, e.g., Amazon.com, as it'd seem like the unit could just be returned for not being the advertised product. I'm curious, though, why would anyone bother with a scam like that? I mean, it'd seem like someone with the necessary technical skills could make a larger, steadier income through honest means. So why would they waste their time/effort on something that can backfire when noticed by the returns center or the next buyer? It certainly wouldn't surprise me if people've done this a few times -- I mean, people do all sorts of weird things -- but is it something that's happened enough to be notable?
    - judge2020 7y ago
      This was done a bit with microsd cards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D6tYBX8vE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D6tYBX8vE
    - rasz 7y ago
      https://www.newsweek.com/22-year-old-allegedly-scammed-amazon-out-370k-return-shipments-filled-dirt-1452452 https://www.newsweek.com/22-year-old-allegedly-scammed-amazo... Thats a lot of zeroes for not much effort.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  You can also get screwed for "new" drives. It depends on whether Amazon gates "new" sales of hard drives and even then, there are likely people gaming the system to get un-gated to sell them. All it takes is the original box and some shrink wrap to make a refurbished drive "new".
gjs278 7y ago
why would anyone go to a store when you can buy it online? total nonsense. the shipping to the store puts it at just as much risk.
paxys 7y ago
Disagree about the local stores part, but yeah for specific areas like electronics I always go for a more trustworthy site (like NewEgg, Jet or sometimes Best Buy). Prices are usually the same as Amazon, and if not they will almost always price match.
- jldugger 7y ago
  IDK, I suspect newegg reviews are equally gamed. Fundamentally, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that product reviews are worth the price the consumer paid for them: typically zero.
  - jraby3 7y ago
    At least there’s no counterfeit products.
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      There are near-death drives being sold as new by third-party sellers on Newegg and all they'll do is step in and fix your order if you complain.
  - paxys 7y ago
    For electronics at least I can't remember the last time user reviews drove my purchase. I always look at specs/benchmarks, reviews on tech sites etc., and then go to the vendor with a fair idea of what I want.
all_blue_chucks 7y ago
Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  BestBuy will price match Amazon. So getting the real deal sounds better.
  - paxys 7y ago
    You local Best Buy will also probably have 5 hard disks total. The chances of getting exactly what you want (looking at the list in the linked site) is minimal.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      Hard Disks sure, but I've gotten a reasonable choice of SSD's even one that was faster than any SSD I've owned thus far.
      - wtallis 7y ago
        It's really easy for Best Buy to stock Samsung SSDs and therefore offer you something faster than anything else you've ever owned. But that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying by at least $40/TB compared to a good Amazon or Newegg price on an almost-as-fast drive from a smaller brand.
        giancarlostoro 7y ago
        It wasn't a Samsung SSD, I don't really buy Samsung since it seems overpriced and overhyped most of the time, unless I catch a sweet deal. I had bought a Sandisk that was actually more performant than I anticipated, it was noticeable immediately after installing Linux on it.
wtallis 7y ago
Buying an internal hard drive from Amazon is extremely fraught, but I'm not aware of similar problems for internal SSDs. And they are definitely one of the most reliable places to get good prices for consumer retail SSD models.
- numpad0 7y ago
  I guess SSDs are less sensitive to environments
tartoran 7y ago
I’d buy a lot of things used but never a harddrive or any storage/backup media. Not sure if these are countereit though, I’ve never seen any bootlegs sold as used ever..
- climb_stealth 7y ago
  I probably wouldn't do it either. Though I recently sold my WD Red NAS HD on ebay. Someone made a really good purchase with it. They got it for half price with the original purchase receipt and 1.5 years warranty left. Every now and then you find someone with a conscience selling things on ebay and it is just a pleasant experience and restores some faith in humanity. That is what inspired me to sell it instead of having it collect dust in a drawer for 10 years.

joshstrange 7y ago

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.

ajphdiv 7y ago
I think I hear /r/DataHoarder/ calling you.
- joshstrange 7y ago
  Oh, they have me hook, line, and sinker haha. Them along with /r/homelab and /r/unraid
numpad0 7y ago
Shucked drives aren’t necessarily cheap, bare drives are always cheaper in my country
- joshstrange 7y ago
  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..
PenguinCoder 7y ago
Looking to build an inexpensive DAS array. Any other good ideas for storage/connectivity?
- joshstrange 7y ago
  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. I’m happy to share more if you are interested. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGZ42SM https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGZ42SM

trynumber9 7y ago

See also https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/ https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/

mgr86 7y ago

This guy posted in a thread here a few months ago about side hustles. I was tempted to start my own off of this model. It appears it’s not as easy to get started, and with a new baby I’ve been too distracted. But at the same time with a new baby it’s more tempting for the extra cash.

ajphdiv 7y ago
When my son was small I would put him to bed every night with a book and then sit there in the dark and wait for him to fall asleep. I had a big pillow thing that I would sit on next to the crib (it was big enough that it had back support). Well, that hour of sitting there with my laptop was always one of my most productive hours of the day. Sometimes I would just sit there even after he fell asleep and continue to work.

lvs 7y ago

I wish the entire web looked like this once again. Ah the good ol' days. Please add Newegg and other non-Amazon vendors. Newegg has an API and everything. Around 10 - 15 years ago, I used to use a simple site called pricewatch that wasn't too far off from this.

samstave 7y ago
Or allow submissions from people...
samstave 7y ago
It would also be good to have the backblaze stats linked to on here
kcanini 7y ago
Pricewatch still exists!
- lvs 7y ago
  Really? pricewatch.com times out for me at the moment.
xmichael99 7y ago
Apparently it's against Amazon's API terms to compare with other sites. I recall years ago the guy who runs the site explained that he is only ok to compare Amazon with Amazon.
- mcbits 7y ago
  I don't think it's against the rules, but the rules are complex and spread all over multiple places, and they're like Google in that you have no due process if someone there decides they don't like what you're doing.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    It is against the rules. If you are an e-commerce company (i.e. a competitor) or you operate a shopping comparison service, you are not allowed to use the API at all. https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/api https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/api

sleazy_b 7y ago

This website appears to be messing with my history? After clicking some filters I can't go back.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Data is beautiful.

dzhiurgis 7y ago

Missing External SSD option (also while at it, would need to add speed as it's quite important factor).

Const-me 7y ago
IMO it's better to make that yourself. When you let the companies pick which model of disk to embed in their product, they pick the cheapest one available. Probably not what you want. Personally, I have Zalman ZM-VE300, also no-name m.2 2280 USB 3 enclosures, both work fine. If you'll do the same, don't forget there're 2 sorts of m.2 disks, SATA and NVME, USB enclosures for them aren't compatible.
- wtallis 7y ago
  DIY portable SSDs are great, unless you want something ruggedized/splashproof.

LeoPanthera 7y ago

See also: "Price per TB" - http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/

whatusername 7y ago
Also because I was curious -- looks like LTO-8 is about $12.75 on newegg. Which is still keeping below disk - but only just (and ignores the cost of drives)
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  It's a pain to format LTO-7 for higher capacity in LTO-8 drives, but once you do it's only $5-$5.50 a TB
  - nullc 7y ago
    Your comment inspired me to do some math: I have an old 24 tape robot I haven't used in a while. Priced out a used LTO8 drive and 24 LTO7 tapes, and assuming that they're formatted M8 to 9TB, it still costs out to $0.02/GB-- so only just breaking even with the 12TB USB3 external drives. You need a lot of tapes before LTO starts comparing favorably to current drive prices even using LTO7 tapes. :( like 1PB before it's really attractive.

nullc 7y ago

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.

ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
Also, an option to penalize excessively huge drives would be nice too. For the same price per GB I'd rather buy 2 8TB drives than 1 16TB.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  It’s cheaper per TB to buy 16s rather than 2x 8 TB, or was when I did it a 2 weeks ago. The cost of more bays pushed me there more than anything.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
    Of course. What I meant is I'd like to see an option to weigh in smaller (to be exact: closer to a particular point of available capacity distribution) drive size as a positive feature for the resulting chart. So, in a sense, the same idea, but an opposite of a GP comment.

crummy 7y ago

Why is that external drives are often cheaper than internal?

gh123man 7y ago
I have thought about this as well. I would love someone more knowledgable to chime in - but if I had to guess it is that consumer hard drive sales have been declining a lot in recent years. Desktops are a thing of the past for your average PC user, and as a result hardware/storage upgrades. Laptops, mobile devices, and cloud storage is where it's at. No one is buying hard drives anymore except large enterprises. In order to appeal to the consumer market HDD manufacturers need a value prop to compete with cloud storage. So discounting bulk storage is the play. I am guessing that they are selling "white label" enclosed drives at a lower margin than the enterprise counterparts but still netting more in the long run.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  When I shuck drives like these, I frequently find the higher quality models of drives in there. However, I have heard that they bin their drives and the drives that don't pass muster for enterprise end up getting used in these external drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
climb_stealth 7y ago
I wonder if they are lesser quality or worse specs. External hard drives often don't even show the performance characteristics other than capacity on the boxes. This is different for internal drives from what I recall.
- MacsHeadroom 7y ago
  It's actually the opposite. External hard drives are frequently made from over production of enterprise grade hard disks. [1] Manufacturers would rather over produce high quality drives than risk not being able to fulfill orders. Eventually the surplus gets put in an external housing and rebranded for consumer use. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easystore_8tb_compendium/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easy...

sn 7y ago

We stopped buying drives from Amazon when we got drives for "the wrong region" and couldn't RMA them. 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.

cortesoft 7y ago
Drives for the wrong region? What is that?
- Mattwmaster58 7y ago
  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.
- sn 7y ago
  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.
- robjan 7y ago
  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
- cardiffspaceman 7y ago

syphilis2 7y ago

Wow, SSD prices bounced back after December. I think most people were (and still are) expecting $100/TB to be the new baseline. https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=search https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...

Havoc 7y ago
Think that might just be that item. Still looks pretty consistently dropping to me
Macha 7y ago
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.

Thorrez 7y ago

Although different in 2 ways, this reminds me of this table of RAM prices 1957-2019: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

unlimit 7y ago

How are they getting the data? Is there a API or its plain old scraping?

mNovak 7y ago

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.

dredmorbius 7y ago
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. Less is more.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  I disagree. What is needed is focus, not "less". 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.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Amazon's goal to be the world's retailer, selling everything, creates an incentive for vendors to appear in as many search results as possible. Even if the payoff is small, it's a net positive. For both Amazon and the shopper, most results subtract from the utility of the experience. The incentives problem is that: - For vendor, more hits == benefit. - For Amazon, irrelevant search == small cost, fix == high effort. - For shopper, irrelevant search == high cost, switching retailers == low cost The equilibrium point is shitty Amazon search.

spectramax 7y ago

It is worth noting the design and density of information presented in this website - we've forgotten how to present lots of data to users because the modern trend is to pad everything with whitespace. Dense design, no frills, just a table - this is what the web needs more of.

ejjpi 7y ago
Clear and simple, with filtering and sorting: https://pangoly.com/en/chart/ssd https://pangoly.com/en/chart/ssd (also performance included)

toast0 7y ago

Given Amazon's system for packing items, I would not buy hard drives from them. I don't want my hard drive's retail box bouncing around all over inside the outer amazon box for however long it takes to get to me. That's a recipe for issues down the road (or immediately). That said, this looks like a useful tool. I can accept prices from Amazon and shop around for someone who knows how to pack.

mrtnmcc 7y ago

The price sorting doesn't taken into account shipping (some items aren't Amazon Prime).

kabdib 7y ago

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]

natch 7y ago

This should account for shipping prices, because sellers use them to game the system.

fireattack 7y ago

The list is not comprehensive. For example, this one is missing: WD 6TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive 6TB https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV (I bought it just 1 month ago so it's not newly listed.)

Rapzid 7y ago

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?

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
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.
- kbenson 7y ago
  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). 1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-960-raid&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-... 2: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418-nvme-raid&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux418...

sylv3r 7y ago

This works great, just need to filter the outliers ie: https://imgur.com/XHPtfqa https://imgur.com/XHPtfqa

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

I just spent a few days looking for server hard drives. IOPs, NVMe doesn’t RAID, throughput, latency, raid controllers, on hard drive DRAM cache, SAS vs SATA vs M2 vs PCI, drive writes per day, mean time between failure, specific server firmware on drive... I’d buy anything off this list for me personally, but I’m definitely in research mode and there just isn’t enough info here. Buy on price alone!? Savages!

dudeinjapan 7y ago

Please add Japan (amazon.co.jp) m(-_-)m

gnicholas 7y ago

I see a lot of folks talking about the risk of Amazon commingling and used drives. I buy drives off Amazon, but only external/new. I only uses these drives as backups, and everything is stored on multiple drives (not RAID, they're stored in different places for fire/theft security). I've been doing this for the last 20 years and have rarely had any drive errors (usually it's a partition that goes, but after reformatting it's fine). What I've found is that I outgrow the drive before it dies on me. Once I outgrow a drive, I just buy another that is twice the size and copy everything over from the old drive, which I hang onto but never use. But I wonder, am I doing something wrong here? Or are other people just using drives in different ways (for active files or huge media libraries that they don't want to store redundantly)? I would understand that under those circumstances, failure of a single drive is more catastrophic. I don't mean to be critical here, as I'm far from an expert!

synack 7y ago

Hi, this is my site. Thank you for all of the feedback! I can address a few of the issues you've raised... Missing some products. This is a known bug in how I'm currently importing product data from Amazon's API. Some products are listed with variations that appear on the same product page but are completely separate products in Amazon's catalog. There's no way to get the API to return all of the variations at once, so I have to perform several subrequests to enumerate those. Currently, that doesn't happen. However, I'm in the process of reworking a lot of the data import code to use the new PA-API 5.0 and am planning to make variations work properly with those changes. Filter by products sold by Amazon. Initially, diskprices.com was set to filter out products not sold by Amazon, but I received quite a bit of feedback asking me to remove that filter as some of the best deals are from resellers. The new PA-API does have a populated Merchant field for most products, so I may try to expose that. Display prices including shipping costs. This is addressed in the FAQ (https://diskprices.com/faq.html https://diskprices.com/faq.html), but it really comes down to privacy. I'd need you to login with your Amazon account or give me your location in order to compute tax and shipping information and I really don't want the burden of handling PII. Clicking the Back button does weird things. This is a bug. Whenever you change a filter, a bit of JavaScript updates the URL in your address bar so that you can copy/paste a link to the page you're looking at with the current filters and send it to someone. It appears I'm not capturing the Back event and updating the filters to match the address bar. I'll get this fixed soon. External SSD category is missing. Up until the last few months, there really weren't many external SSDs for sale on Amazon, but it looks like this is definitely becoming it's own product category, so I'll add it. Add Amazon.co.jp. Funny story, diskprices.com had support for Amazon Japan when I first launched it, but they suspended my account and sent an email telling me why, written in japanese. Google Translate couldn't make any sense of the email and I'd had some significant data quality issues with the filters, so I decided not to pursue it further. This is the first time somebody's asked for Amazon.co.jp support. I'll look into setting it up again, but Amazon's added some new restrictions on API access across all regions since then, so it's a bit more difficult to get new regions added now. Account for per-port cost in calculating prices. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I think this feature ends up looking a lot like pcpartpicker, with a constraint solver bolted on the side... Given a set of parameters for total capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, etc, optimize for the best price/performance. I currently don't have enough metadata about most of the drives to implement this properly and it's a big feature to develop, but it's something I want to experiment with eventually. Again, thank you all for the feedback! edit: formatting

reiichiroh 7y ago

Does this site work for amazon Canada?

Havoc 7y ago

More interested in the tech behind the website. Amazon traditionally blocks scrapping quite aggressively

winrid 7y ago
Well, it's not a lot of links. Few hundred maybe. I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice. Hard to parse the page still, maybe.
- Havoc 7y ago
  >I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice. I got blocked on very first attempt to scrap from cloud. Literally request #1. ...with code that worked fine on residential IP five mins earlier (where I coded it). I'm sure it can be circumvented, but that experience led me to believe it's better to just save the time and pay for a res proxy (as sketchy as that concept is)
  - winrid 7y ago
    Wow that's impressive. One solution is to just have some random subset of your users do your scraping for you... Then send the data to the server. Insecure, but probably good enough for a page like this.

MrGilbert 7y ago

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] [1]: https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008-a1504505.html https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008... [2]: https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000vn008-a1504505.html https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-st4000v...

londons_explore 7y 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.
- rasz 7y ago
  >producing at near zero margin :)) https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin 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.
  - willis936 7y ago
    Then we don’t have anything at all. Hard drives are only acceptable at long term storage if they’re unplugged, and even then there is a significant risk that the data won’t be accessible in 50 years. If 5 years is considered long term, then SSDs are acceptable. If 20 years is considered long term, well, make sure you have a robust RAID.

krychu 7y ago

Such a great site! Love the simple design and lack of ornamentation.

Dolores12 7y ago

I believe its against TOS to provide price on your website for specific product. It could lead to amazon affiliate account ban.

thierryzoller 7y ago

I think you'd do a lot of money with referal links. I'd be a regular user. Please extend.

adriansky 7y ago

It would be nice to have sorting!

mdip 7y ago

This is the second "Find X on Amazon more easily" sites that I've come across in the last week or so (the last was a USB hub filtering site). Including eBay in the mix, it's the third such site[0]. I love these sites. It's just sad that it's difficult-to-near-impossible to actually use Amazon (or eBay) for the exact same purpose. The perfect example hit me, yesterday. I wanted a new A/C adapter for my Thinkpad. It's a USB-C laptop, so simple, right? Start with a search. OK, there's a lot of A/C adapters, and a lot of USB-C adapters for phones. In the mix is one or two (over-priced, non-OEM) adapters. Let's try the A/C adapters category, maybe I can click into that and filter based on the metadata? First, find the category. A few minutes later, settle on something somewhat close. This shouldn't be too difficult; this thing can be powered by anything 60W or higher that supports USB-PD and has a USB-C end on it. Nope. Not a single filter and a few thousand results are returned[1]. Product properties/metadata are so important -- why are so many important bits of data completely missing/unavailable to me while trying to find what I need? I feel like Amazon and eBay have managed to recreate the experience of shopping at a Walmart Super Center online -- a store full of products, organized by some magician, in order to make a 2 minute purchase require 20 minutes of browsing. I guess I don't have to roll the dice picking a check-out line that might move quickly, but outside of that, the experience is so bad that I have a solid four or five things I need to buy which I've attempted to find and simply given up. And it used to be that you could find other shops online that were more narrow in their product categories (but not selection in said categories) and offered better options for filtering and finding the precise item you were looking for. Many of those are gone, now. The ones that remain all use a handful of off-the-shelf cart software and are often worse for finding products[2] or the price is so much worse that you end up finding the product and searching for its specific part number on Amazon. I have to say, though, I clicked this link because I have been putting off purchasing an NVMe SSD drive. So thank you to whomever is responsible for this site; that was very helpful in getting me to pull the trigger. In a more perfect world, a site designed to make it possible to filter available products by a set of incredibly important, common properties which is directly tied to the site who's job it is to sell you the actual products wouldn't even exist. In this world, it gets over 250 upvotes and has more than 160 comments after being on HN for about 13 hours. [0] https://labgopher.com https://labgopher.com [1] Unless, of course, I decide to sort by anything other than "Featured" whatever-the-heck-that-means, then there's 150 or so. [2] NewEgg does a better job than Amazon, but too often a filter will eliminate a set of products because they refer to a common property of a product by a different name; I can tolerate that, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to so frequently.

justaguyhere 7y ago

Isn't it against amazon terms to show prices?