Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
Thankfully got my money back.
Years ago I ordered some T-Shirts to test and they were all fake versions that barely survived the first wash. Haven't ordered anything since then.
If you see "Ships from Amazon, Sold by RandomCompany" you might worry about counterfeits. But the "Sold by Amazon" item might also have been sourced from (or counterfeited by) "RandomCompany".
My current car has a traditional steel-can filter. I cut those open after oil changes to inspect for debris.
They obviously replaced it no problem but it highlighted they were either still mixing stock or were using a dodgy supplier themselves.
I'm noticing an increasing number of brands who don't have an official Amazon presence, probably for that reason.
Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?
I went from spending > 10k€ per year to less than 5%, probably not even that, on there, all by their own fault.
And i see no reason to buy there anymore:
- the default assumption of having the best price on the web went out of the window years ago
- next (or 2) day delivery - does not happen anymore in most cases, Prime or not
- even finding (!!) what you're searching for is a total sh.t show
- for years, Amazon is now a front for chinese cr.p shipped by the boatload
- the once useful review system has been and is being gamed, it is beyond broken these days and should not be trusted (basically forget everything that scores 4.5 or less, read all reviews and ensure that the review you're reading is not for some other variant of the item you're looking for or that the review you're looking at hasn't been swapped one item for another, because that's a thing as well on there...)
I mean - buying things on Aliexpress is more trustworthy, for crying out loud - yet, most people can't seem to be bothered. scratchinghead
I can find the same or better prices (including shipping) from other suppliers.
Not really 100% sure why you're getting down-voted (edit: I guess not anymore. Comment was gray when I replied.), but to answer your question, no. I do not trust Amazon for anything important.
I do still sometimes use Amazon in spite of this, only because they are nonetheless very useful. They have a very wide selection, and are often able to do same-day and 1-day shipping of almost anything even over here in some random suburbia. This has become important lately because things I used to just buy physically are no longer obtainable physically. For example, the last local electronics store went out of business, and the nearest Micro-Center is probably an hour drive or so, and that's not even as good for electronics.
Still, I'm always skeptical of Amazon. I never trust that the prices are the lowest, and often they're not. And I never trust that the product will be authentic, because it might not be, though it usually still is. And yep, the review system is bullshit. You can see people playing around with "variations" to basically group unrelated things, if not literally re-using an old Amazon product ID. And when you search for anything, even if Amazon actually has decent products from known brands, they'd prefer to show you key-smash anonymous Chinese brands instead, even when the prices aren't that much cheaper anyway.
But, that's just how it goes. People voted with their wallets and they chose Amazon, and now that they did and all of the smaller local shops are all dead, Amazon doesn't really need to worry about competing with them anymore.
Let me tell you a little story my friend ....
Near my friend's house, there used to be a little mulit-generation "mom & pop" hardware shop.
It was an aladdin's cave. As a customer the place looked a mess, floor to ceiling (and even the ceiling !) covered in hardware widgets. But the owner could wave his magic wand and go find exactly what you wanted.
One day, across the street, a new shop opened. It was the "click & collect" branch for a large national hardware retailer.
All the builders and electricians that used to shop at the little shop moved over to the large retailer because they had all their trade discounts.
The little shop couldn't survive on the random home owner just popping into buy a single screw or a short length of cable. So they shut down.
Fast forward a few years and along comes Mr Property Developer. Takes one look at the patch where the large national retailer's shop is and thinks "ooh, that looks nice".
So they bought out those shops, knocked them down and turned the plot into a high-rise instead. But the national retailer survived because by then most people were getting stuff delivered to site from online orders by couriers and not doing many collections.
So dream all you like about "support your local business". But the reality is that its more like Darwin's theory of evolution out there. Those who can adapt thrive. Those who don't will be eaten by a predator.
The reality is its 2025, we live in an ever increasing online world, and all these "local businesses" of which you speak need to learn that online footfall is just as important (if not more important) than the traditional walk-in footfall.
Not the person you're asking, but yes, I do.
You know the biggest reason wny ?
Their no-bullshit returns policy.
Seriously. Click button, get your returns label. The refund is sent to you as soon as the courier or post office has scanned the barcode.
Hell, sometimes Amazon just refund you and don't even want the item returned !
You don't get that anywhere else. At most other vendors you have to fight to even get a returns label. And even if those other vendors give you a returns label without a fight, you have to wait until their warehouse has processed your return and hope that you don't get charged a restocking fee or they try to claim some bullshit excuse about you having lightly scratched something.
Oh, you want to know another reason too ?
I don't like spreading my personal data far and wide.
Yeah, sure I'm sure I could buy my widget from some random shop. Probably at a cheaper price than Amazon too, I'm sure.
But that means another place with my personal data on their database.
Open to that company spamming me, and the Russians hacking them and spaffing my personal data all over the darkweb.
Say what you like about Amazon. But I think their Infosec practices are pretty good.
I have been waiting for three weeks for them to pick up some fake POD-crap they delivered instead of the books that I had ordered and refund Rs. 800 (~ $8). I have had about 8-10 phone calls with them regarding this issue and CS is completely unbothered (with one exception, but too little too late). They do their fake apologies and set up another return pickup.
These last three weeks have been absolutely terrible as far as deliveries and Amazon CS are concerned. I have been moving all new purchases to Walmart-owned Flipkart as I no longer have the mental bandwidth to deal with these people.
For me, it's just physical books, basically.
Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
I recently had to replace an entire array of SATA SSDs with models that could support DRAT/DZAT*. Their Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs came with the original Samsung stickers sealing them, and they scanned each one to attribute it to my purchase. I'm sure it as much to protect them as me, i.e. that if I returned a drive, I gave them back the drive with the exact Device ID that originally came in that package. Nonetheless it was reassuring for me as well.
*For anyone who uses SATA drives attached to an SAS HBA, please check that your SATA drives support DRAT and DZAT. Unbeknownst to you, your drives may be failing to TRIM when connected through your HBA!
I have a 10 year old Intel one in one of my machines and it's still 95% health.
How do you find them, please? Do you just query for "enterprise ssd"? I've just run this search and indeed it returns lots of models from different brands. Thank you.
I purchased 10 genuine new from a verified vendor and 6 had to be RMA’d within the first year.
It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon).
So now I shop at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.
It's to buy fake reviews. They "sell" something very cheap so fake reviewers can buy it and write a positive review. Once done, they change the page back to the actual scam.
By the way, you should contact Kingston and notify them that you have a fraudulent drive. Chances are they'll exchange it for a new drive so they can investigate it.
I ordered one first expecting it to be used or fake, but the packaging looked good (original and untampered) and the Intel disk software said it had only factory number of read/writes so I went all in and bought all the disks they had...
30x at $100 instead of the original $1.000 price tag. Still $3.000 sounds like an aweful lot when it's only 64GB disks, but I know how it feels when your OS drive corrupts and that's not something I want to keep experiencing over and over every 5 (if you are lucky) years.
Now with a few (24/7 operation) years under their belt I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".
More like "How to spend $3k and think you did something".
For this amount what you spent you could get any, literally any SSD, use only 64Gb and be fine for decades. Or use more than 64Gb and be fine for... decades anyway.
You literally could buy a server class mixed workload SATA drive with a DWPD of 4.
https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d3/s4620.html
And quite amusingly, any modern SATA SSD runs at the top of SATA3/SATA600 specs, with ~500MB/s for read and write:
Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Read (up to): 550 MB/s
Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Write (up to): 500 MB/s
Random Read (100% Span): 85000 IOPS
Random Write (100% Span): 48000 IOPS
Sustained sequential read: up to 250 MB/s
Sustained sequential write: up to 170 MB/s
Random 4 KB reads: >35,000 IOPS
Random 4 KB writes: >3,300 IOPS
Eternal growth does not exist, SSDs peaked in 2011 for durability without complexity.
Just like DDR3 has the lowest CAS latency with ok bandwidth and longevity.
DDR4 actually breaks after 10 years.
DDR2 probably lasts more than 100 years.
Think about that, any device manufactured in the coming 50 years will be outlived by 32-bit Raspberry 2!
You just need a bunch of older SD cards and a distributed storage so that you don't loose data.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
(the title is also ~p~fun)
senectus1•6h ago
amazon just refunded me the whole amount and I pulled it apart to see what was inside: https://imgur.com/a/NUSuuEh
quite annoying, though also amusing.
Cervisia•5h ago
These flash part numbers look like Intel. This is actually plausible; until 2018, Intel and Micron had a flash partnership. And while their Crucial brand has some good high-end drives, they are also willing to sell absolute bottom-of-the-barrel trash.
What are these discrepancies, and what's off in the SMART values?
senectus1•3h ago
It was 2 years ago.. so thats all i have :-P
dlcarrier•3h ago
Ekaros•3h ago