Comment by crinkly
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
I hear this a lot online - buy used enterprise stuff online, it'll be cheaper and lasts long (at least you get your money's worth). But when you start to explore the online market for these used enterprise hardware, you find that nobody really sells it for cheap any more, at a price that makes sense to buy it. For example, if a new enterprise class SSD is $250, you may find a used one for $125. But then, brand new consumer SSDs of the same capacity are also available for $125 with warranty. At that point, it doesn't make any sense to buy used hardware, enterprise or otherwise, with no real guarantees of how usable it is. I feel the used hardware markets has also been cornered and monopolised by a few sellers, and you really have to hunt hard for a true bargain. (Maybe on Craigslist?).
You can monitor https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php - they have a "Great Deals" and a "For Sale/..." section. There is a 'Enterprise SSD "small deals"' topic with recent activity. That's relevant for both EU and US: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...
I got my enterprise SSDs (1.6TB, 3DWPD, drawback: SAS3) from our Craigslist-equivalent. First I got 2 for 150€ and had a nice chat with the seller, who seems to had a big box of these. A week later he offered me his remaining 3 disks for another 150€. On eBay it seems you have to make offers.
Some local info: I also noticed on the German eBay getting Chinese cards to be much more expensive than on eBay in the US. The same seller asking 80€ or 100€ for the same LSI 9400. However, finding the article on eBay.com and then using the item ID on eBay.de allowed me to get it for the better price.
Yeah I tend to agree, used enterprise storage can still be expensive depending on what you need compared to buying used enterprise compute, memory, networking, etc. When old gear gets decomm'd it's common to just toss all the old storage medium into a shredder while selling all the rest so it's an imbalance of equipment.
I'm in Europe. It turns up cheap here. You do have to hunt for it but I bag 1.92TB disk for $70 a pop usually. I have 5 already.
I did get a used fake M.2 drive once. Likely the seller had bought a fake drive, used it for a while, then dissatisfied upgraded to something else. It possible the seller didn't know it was fake, but I doubt it.
> I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay.
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.
Look specifically for the feature "power loss protection" (or PLP). This is a bank of capacitors that allows the drive to finish its current write in the event of a power loss. really common feature in enterprise drives.
The sellers usually do not write "enterprise" in the offer. You have to know the model numbers (for example, the SK Hynix Platinum P41 is the same as the Solidigm P44 Pro and the SK Hynix PC801).
Never again with the SK Hynix drives. They have an issue they've ignored for years and refuse to fix that means the cache eventually fails on them, write speeds plummet, and the drive turns to shit. They recently released a firmware to fix it and it did nothing.
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/all-sk-hynix-p41-ssds-suffer...
You'll find reports from around the web of people flashing updated firmware and getting better performance for a few days or weeks, then it cuts back in half again.
Thanks, but how do you know that those are enterprise SSDs? Of the three you've mentioned, only Solidigm P44 Pro's homepage explicitly classifies it as an enterprise SSD.
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Could you share which models do you aim for?
Usually whatever half decent Samsung, Micron or Intel ones are available.
I have a 10 year old Intel one in one of my machines and it's still 95% health.