Comment by Aurornis
9 hours ago
> 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.
> 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.
If a marketplace is prone to scammers, and is unable or unwilling to get rid of and assist in the prosecution of the scammers, then it is 100% the scammers' fault.
No, "force the seller to create yet another account" doesn't count as doing anything.
The problem is that you might not be able to tell a used drive from a new drive if the scammer bothered to reset the SMART data.
> if the scammer bothered to reset the SMART data.
You can't universally reset SMART data on an SSD unless you happen to have a model where factory tools are available on the internet or something.
You don't need a universal tool. You just need one that resets the drives you're selling.
I've worked with a vendor who were a bit fast and loose with what NAND / controller / firmware they considered "ACME SC9000" SSDs to be. Because of this, some of the drives actually had bad configurations. They gave us tools to query / reset / update the firmware on these drives. The SMART data was one of the options you could reset.
Given the number of $10 self-reporting "10TB" USB drives out there, if there's enough of a profit incentive and volume of drives, you can't rule out a SMART reset drive.
I have never gone through the process of selling on Amazon. For those of us anchored to news articles from decades in the past, is there any public documentation of these procedures?