It's crazy to me that rsync.net is buying mission-critical enterprise drives on Amazon.
I don't buy drives on Amazon for my 9 year old's laptop because of the rampant fraud and counterfeiting, I'm shocked that they're trusted for any business use-cases by anyone moderately savvy. I'm even more shocked that the takeaway is to blame the individual seller, rather than the marketplace that makes it possible.
Can you flash fake SMART data to drives? I suspect that's exactly what Maestro will start doing now (although it's possible it's not worth the effort for the small number of customers who will actually check this stuff).
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.
"Other than returning the four parts for a refund (which we did) and documenting this behavior here, our only other recourse was to guarantee that these four specific parts were never sold as new again:"
Alas, one can completely remove Sharpie writing from metal with 99% isopropyl alcohol. Did they make a better choice? This looks like Sharpie writing to me.
Back in my NOC tech/datacenter days, we grew to trust drives with a combination of 10000+ poweron hrs + {zero SMART errors / zero reallocated sectors / zero pending sectors} actually more than a random unknown new drive.
It is WILD that anyone in tech assumes this will come as new. Simply no one makes the same model of "consumable" for 7 years. Intel doesn't even sell Intel-branded SSDs anymore, that division was spinned off.
It's also WILD that you would trust something as sketchy sounding as "Maestro Technologies" for a mission-critical task.
First, let me clarify that by no means I am defending Maestro Technology here, scammers should receive much more than just some bad publicity. But the quote from the article looks a little overdramatizing: "This is particularly disturbing because the intended duty cycle of these parts is intensive and we'd probably burn through the remaining writes on these SSDs in _less than two years._"
Let's calculate:
DWPD for the D3-S4510 is 2, giving TBW = 2.84*2(DWPD)*365(days)*5(years) = 10366 TB, or around 10^10 MiB (9885787963 exactly). SMART attribute NAND writes tells 3068104*32 MiB written, which is around 10^8 MiB (98179328 exactly). So, there is 99% of the drive's resource still left, if we are talking about flash wear.
The second drive's NAND writes attribute is 356474, which is 11% of that of the first drive. And it's D3-S4610, which DWPD is 3, so the writes barely scratched the surface.
Again, I am not liking scammers who sell used drives a single bit, the overall situation is getting worse, it's way harder now to buy new genuine disk drives (and electronics in general). But let's just be honest, this particular case is not bad, rsync.net got lucky.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadI don't buy drives on Amazon for my 9 year old's laptop because of the rampant fraud and counterfeiting, I'm shocked that they're trusted for any business use-cases by anyone moderately savvy. I'm even more shocked that the takeaway is to blame the individual seller, rather than the marketplace that makes it possible.
Alas, one can completely remove Sharpie writing from metal with 99% isopropyl alcohol. Did they make a better choice? This looks like Sharpie writing to me.
Without it, there isn't enough incentive to try and just eat the cost of a refund in the rare case they get caught.
It is WILD that anyone in tech assumes this will come as new. Simply no one makes the same model of "consumable" for 7 years. Intel doesn't even sell Intel-branded SSDs anymore, that division was spinned off.
It's also WILD that you would trust something as sketchy sounding as "Maestro Technologies" for a mission-critical task.
I bet they were cheap though.
* I reported it to Amazon's fraud team (with evidence): No response
* I wrote the seller a bad review (also with evidence!): Taken down by Amazon
https://x.com/johnboiles/status/1879713174427214131?s=20
Let's calculate: DWPD for the D3-S4510 is 2, giving TBW = 2.84*2(DWPD)*365(days)*5(years) = 10366 TB, or around 10^10 MiB (9885787963 exactly). SMART attribute NAND writes tells 3068104*32 MiB written, which is around 10^8 MiB (98179328 exactly). So, there is 99% of the drive's resource still left, if we are talking about flash wear.
The second drive's NAND writes attribute is 356474, which is 11% of that of the first drive. And it's D3-S4610, which DWPD is 3, so the writes barely scratched the surface.
Again, I am not liking scammers who sell used drives a single bit, the overall situation is getting worse, it's way harder now to buy new genuine disk drives (and electronics in general). But let's just be honest, this particular case is not bad, rsync.net got lucky.