Comment by Joel_Mckay
3 years ago
To workaround the various tricks a drive can play, one may wish to use a capacity tester in addition to hardware stats.
Fight Flash Fraud (f3)
https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
One could setup a destructive wear-test, but results may not be generalized between lots with identical model number. This is because some manufactures sell performant products for early reviews/shills, and eventually start cost-optimizing the identical product sku with degraded performance.
As annoying as the bait-and-switch trend became, for off-brand consumer hardware YMMV.
Good luck =)
Kind of going on a tangent, but I think it's relevant so please bear with me:
I never understood the point of cheaping out on storage media.
Look, I get it. Most of us have budgets to work with, not all of us can afford enterprise 40TB Kioxia SSDs or enterprise HDDs hot off the presses.
But if I actually, truly care about my data I'm going to at least shell out for (brand new!) drives from reputable brands like Samsung, Crucial, Seagate, Western Digital, Kingston, and so on. The ease of mind is worth the cost, as far as I'm concerned.
What is the rationale behind buying used drives, or drives from off-brand vendors of unknown or even ill reputation? Aside from just goofing around, I mean. I never can justify the idea, no matter how strapped for cash I could be.
Partially its because the details are somewhat opaque. I do buy new drives from reputable brands, but can find it hard to know what I gain and what I lose at different price points within those manufacturers. It's hard to even find out which drives are dram less, never mind what other features they have that impact reliability. From the days of ibm deskstars I've also learned that drive model reliability is likely only understood by the time its off the market.
(I agree in principle that used or off brand drives seem insane to me, but at the same time, I do live on laptops I buy used so their drives are actually used as well :/)
You can never rely on a storage medium being perfect, so you must always plan for redundancy (e.g. ZFS, off-site backups).
When you have that, cheaping out on storage doesn’t matter so much anymore.
I am assuming appropriate precautions are being taken, so that is beside the point.
I'm talking about saving a dime on cheapo, non-reputable drives only to then spend extra time verifying they are actually fit for service.
Why? Why would someone do this? I'm of the mind that buying a drive from a reputable vendor and saving yourself the time of verification and other red tape is worth the additional cost premium.
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There is little proof that the "enterprise" expensive ones are that much more durable, let alone for the price. Enterprise ones usually have some better power off protection and some more spare flash for write endurance but that's about it. Hell, we just had 2 of the enterprise intel ones outright die in last month (out of lot of ~30), at 98% life left!
On spinning rust there is practically no difference on reliability (assuming you buy drives designed for 24/7 not some green shit), just that you can attach SAS to it. We got stacks of dead drives to prove it.
> What is the rationale behind buying used drives, or drives from off-brand vendors of unknown or even ill reputation? Aside from just goofing around, I mean. I never can justify the idea, no matter how strapped for cash I could be.
That the flash is the same but strapped to different controller.
And if you truly care about your data you want redundancy, not more expensive storage. Put saved money into getting your home server with ECC memory(in home) or having one extra node or hot spare (in work).
Use-cases differ even for storage, and cost is sometimes a competitive advantage in low-value products. While high-end SSD include onboard super-capacitors to keep the hardware stable during power-failures, larger drive ram buffers with fetch prediction, and sector sparing with wear leveling.
If your stack uses anything dependent on classic transactional integrity, than the long term hidden IT costs of cheap ssd failures don't make sense.
"buy cheap, buy twice" as they say. =)