I don't buy drives on Amazon for my 9 year old's laptop because of the rampant fraud and counterfeiting, I'm shocked that they're trusted for any business use-cases by anyone moderately savvy. I'm even more shocked that the takeaway is to blame the individual seller, rather than the marketplace that makes it possible.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707 (HDD shortage)
>At rsync.net we have trusted suppliers with verified supply chains and a long history of providing reliable service.
>However, from time to time, it is expedient to purchase parts from Amazon - something we do with care and suspicion.
That seems like a very reasonable and non-crazy approach to using Amazon.
ZFS helped me discover that my motherboard SATA chip can't handle 6 drives; I had to purchase a cheap Chinese PCI Express SATA controller to communicate with my drives reliably and error-free.
Alas, one can completely remove Sharpie writing from metal with 99% isopropyl alcohol. Did they make a better choice? This looks like Sharpie writing to me.
Alcohol/solvent resistant markers.
I buy drives on Amazon all the time. I check them all. Never had any problems.
The mistake they made was buying not from Amazon, but from "Maestro Technology" listing on Amazon. If you understand that Amazon is a marketplace and you take 10 seconds to read who you're buying from, it's not a problem.
Amazon returns are also extremely easy. I once gambled on a sketchy seller and received a bad product (not computer related). A couple clicks and it was on its way back for a refund.
The problems with inventory commingling are virtually a thing of the past. I went through the process of selling a product on Amazon and understanding their evolved inventory labeling and commingling procedures so I'm not worried. Many of the tech community are anchored to news articles from years ago, though.
If you have a highly trusted vendor who can deliver at great prices and have products in stock that show up at your door when you need them, then use that. For the rest of us, using Amazon to buy common parts isn't really the problem that it's made out to be in HN comments. I think a lot of people here only understand Amazon through the occasional article that makes it to the top of HN and they don't understand what it's really like because they've been too scared to use it for years.
I did not know, per that article, that Amazon had for some time now offered motivated third-party sellers a means to avoid commingling by applying a “fulfillment network SKU” barcode to their goods. And that they estimate merchants spend $600mm a year on that type of “restickering.” Expensive, but possible.
[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2025/after-years-of-backlash-amazon...
Thousands of hours doesn't pass the smell test. There's no way a specific SSD goes through months of testing prior to sale. A couple of hours seems reasonable though. And I'd rather it not be easy to reset the counters, so they don't reset the counters after testing during manufacturing/burn-in.
Without it, there isn't enough incentive to try and just eat the cost of a refund in the rare case they get caught.
We don't.
"At rsync.net we have trusted suppliers with verified supply chains and a long history of providing reliable service."
...
"However, from time to time, it is expedient to purchase parts from Amazon - something we do with care and suspicion."
... and that care and suspicion takes the form of physical and logical inspections and extended part burn-in.
As you can see, this QC process caught these mis-labeled parts.
It is WILD that anyone in tech assumes this will come as new. Simply no one makes the same model of "consumable" for 7 years. Intel doesn't even sell Intel-branded SSDs anymore, that division was spinned off.
It's also WILD that you would trust something as sketchy sounding as "Maestro Technologies" for a mission-critical task.
I bet they were cheap though.
Intel did last orders for that drive Dec 30 2022. The article was written in April, so the author was conceivably purchasing drives that had sat on a shelf for a year and a half. That doesn't tickle alarm bells in my head.
Secondly, maybe my scam detector isn't well tuned enough, but "Maestro Technologies" doesn't seem that much stranger than "Apple" or "Micro soft" or "Zoom" or "Snap." If it were XBBHHZZZAA, LLC, maybe I'd have more room for pause.
The takeaway lesson here is that Amazon has become less and less reliable as a source for items. It's especially bad if it's purchased from a third party (something Amazon seems keen not to highlight on the purchase page), but even FBA is not free of trash. They straight up sell pirated N64 cartridges for example: https://www.amazon.com/Cartridge-Nintendo-Smash-64-Video-Ver...
Both sellers issued refunds without trouble because I bought them under Prime. One seller seemed genuinely surprised they had a counterfeit in stock.
Both of these counterfeit drives look very, very convincingly authentic, except the serial numbers don't match real ones and don't validate as real ones with the OEM.
The first time, I actually argued with Seagate over it being real, until they pointed out that aside from the serial number not being in their databases, it's not even in the correct format for any of their drives.
If you care about your drives and you're buying on Amazon, only buy under Prime. And when they're delivered, check the serial numbers with the OEM first thing (usually via warranty validation). Don't buy anything not on Prime.
However, an even more fundamental philosophy behind any work that we do is "defense in depth" which means that even after building the fault-tolerant, anti-fragile system, we also spend time and resources qualifying the inputs ...
... and then spend time and resources monitoring the outputs (error rates, failures, correlation, etc.).
Any one of those pieces is, theoretically, sufficient. Layering the pieces in a defense in depth strategy is what gives us the highly confident posture we enjoy.
The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the serial number against the manufacturers database if available is also a good precaution.
These are probably things you should be doing whether or not the drive is allegedly new.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Larger-disks-wi...
> For those of you tracking the stats closely, you’ll notice that the Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB) is a frequent flier on this list. The last time it had a failure was in Q3 2024—and it was just a single failure for the whole quarter!
IMHO, it's more important to consider correlated failures rather than worry about getting the best or avoiding the worst drives. Try to avoid running an array that's built from same model, same firmware, same build time, same power on hours, same workload. Every so often, you get things like drive disappears when power on time overflows, or a manufacturing error that makes most drives fail after N weeks of use, having all of your drives in the same part of their lifecycle makes you more likely to experience a catastrophic failure that failure rate analysis wouldn't pick up.
Picking SSDs carefully bears more fruit, there are many more makers and wider variance in performance and reliability as well as characteristics during failure: everyone says SSDs go read only during failure, but my experience has been that lots of SSDs disappear from their interfaces during failure; you might reasonably have less redundancy if you have confidence the SSD will remain readable for recovery if it fails.