How Not to Buy a SSD
20 comments
·August 18, 2025jchw
Moru
I'm curious with what you mean with "Even sold by Amazon". The last few years I see nothing but reports of cheap fake products over Amazon.
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.
reeddavid
I think this comment references something many people don't realize: Even items that say "Ships from Amazon, Sold by Amazon" could be counterfeit, because the inventory from third party sellers is co-mingled with Amazon's own inventory.
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".
trenchpilgrim
I began noticing this about seven or eight years ago when the oil filters I bought changed from official ones to obvious counterfeits (certain pieces were missing entirely + media was much thinner than the real ones). Had to switch to a local auto parts supplier to guarantee the correct part.
kaelwd
Amazon is literally just aliexpress with faster shipping at this point.
prmoustache
In my experience, Amazon is also generally more expensive than online shops specialized in one domain for branded non generic aliexpresslike items.
doawoo
I wanted to upgrade my NAS with some 12TB drives and two of them in the box from Amazon had been powered on (according to the SMART data) for over a year!
Thankfully got my money back.
unsnap_biceps
I've moved over to almost exclusively buying from B&H. They generally have similar prices to other vendors and they manage their own inventory directly with manufacturers, so no concerns about fraudulent hardware.
zargon
Me too, for the same reason. Also if you use their store credit card, they give a discount equal to the sales tax.
null
moepstar
> even sold by Amazon
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
jchw
> 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?
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.
trenchpilgrim
I quit Prime months ago and honestly the only feature I miss is fast shipping for household items.
I can find the same or better prices (including shipping) from other suppliers.
tomoiaga
eMag is full of fake SSDs. Don’t ever buy from sellers, only if sold by eMag directly or from a reputable seller that you know. And it’s not only SSDs. This has been going on for many years and yes, when you give in to promotions like 70-80% the price of an original you usually get a fake.
stroebs
I’d also like to point out that those Kingston A400’s are notoriously terrible and had a firmware bug that caused the behaviour you describe if you don’t update it before it happens.
I purchased 10 genuine new from a verified vendor and 6 had to be RMA’d within the first year.
cm2187
ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011) or Samsung (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that.
Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
crinkly
I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay. No one bothers to fake them and they last longer than the consumer ones even if they are a few years old.
senectus1
Had the same issue with a Crucial drive from amazon. looked just like the real thing but for some small discrepancies. Performed like an absolute dog and the SMART data was waaaay off.
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
There is nothing obviously suspicious with what's inside. The SATA form factor was designed for HDDs; solid-state drives usually are not much larger than a M.2 drive.
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?
In general I am afraid to buy storage devices except directly from the vendor at the moment. I've heard that there's also lots of fraudulent HDDs being sold with botched SMART data, even on Amazon, even marked as "New", even sold by Amazon. Scary proposition unless you're dying to test out your RAID array redundancy.