Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New

You can also remove sharpie writing using sharpies and a wet wipe - write over and wipe while its still wet. The dry pigment will dissolve in the solvent in the fresh ink.

https://www.amazon.com/Janlaugh-Resistant-Laboratory-Permane...

Alcohol/solvent resistant markers.

They can do it but they likely won't bother at scale.

> I bought a stack of WD gold drives several years ago that had several thousand hours on them as well. I believe I got those off Newegg. When I asked, they said something about initial testing, but why didn't they reset the counters before selling them? Who knows.

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.

First two lines of the article:

>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.

> I'm shocked that they're trusted for any business use-cases by anyone moderately savvy.

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.

Marketplaces only work when the participants maintain a reputation. The buyer here is doing his part.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707 (HDD shortage)

I buy used enterprise hard drives that have been pushed hard. My current biggest NAS runs six used 14 terabyte enterprise hard drives and three have failed so far within a year. Each time I was able to get a warranty replacement and the replacement was in much better condition than the original ones I had. Zero data loss because of ZFS RAID Z2. I was able to measure the condition of the surface of the platters and other useful metadata using Victoria https://hdd.by/victoria/ included on Hiren's BootCD PE.

> blame the individual seller, rather than the marketplace

I'd have thought the fraud problems from "commingling" were well-enough known by now to avoid wanting to blame any specific Amazon Marketplace vendor, but perhaps not.

I mean, if you're a storage business, hopefully you've designed your architecture such that you assume drives will go bad, so you characterize the models of drive to make sure that not all the copies are on one manufacturer, and then you can take liberties finding the cheapest storage on the market. This only comes back to bite you when you didn't account for (because you didn't know) that there was decreased longevity, so your TCO calculation was off and you might not make as much money.

from time to time your trusted supplier might be out of stock and you need drivers quickly

even backblaze bought drives in supermarket when there was HDD shortage

That was my first thought too. Apparently they’re “phasing it out” by “the end of this year” [0]

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...