# Skeptism just kicked into overdrive (too good to be true) SSDs



## Robert1950 (Jan 21, 2006)

I checked the retail price of a Sandisk 1TB SSD for comparison, about $170Cdn.

This ad was on Facebook for 16TB SSD. Price is in US $$. I got a strong "Danger! Dander Will Robinson" vibe.


----------



## Sneaky (Feb 14, 2006)

They had me at FOR DOG LOVER COLLECTION HOT SALE.


----------



## laristotle (Aug 29, 2019)

You can find 500g at that price.


----------



## Paul Running (Apr 12, 2020)

Yeah, a good reason that your senses should be on alert, likely one those East Asian magical drives. They are setup so that the drive controller fools the operating system into believing that it's dealing with a 16TB drive by an emulator. When the drive is formatted by the OS...the true capacity is revealed.


----------



## knight_yyz (Mar 14, 2015)

That's a plain old sata unless I am missing something. No nvme....


----------



## Hammerhands (Dec 19, 2016)

Memory Express has a 4TB Seagate USB 3.0 for $120. I suppose this isn’t beyond the beyond. Oh, it’s listed as under SSD, but it isn‘t.

Let’s see…

Amazon has a few 4TB direct from China for $25, $29, $36.

When you could buy super cheap memory cards they were usually not what they tried to appear to be. They would show up on your system as 128gb, but when you wrote more than 32gb on them they would fail.

What they were, I think, were 32gb cards on which someone had changed a few bytes so it would report 128gb, or where they had put the 128gb firmware on it. Or maybe the 128gb is the same as 32gb, but with fewer failed sections, and some unscrupulous person toggled some bits.

$75 on Amazon direct from China for an identical one.








Portable SSD 16TB Super Capacity High Speed Transmission Chip Mobile Phone Can be Connected USB3.1 Transmission Technology Suitable for Laptop, PC,16TB,Silver : Amazon.ca: Electronics


Portable SSD 16TB Super Capacity High Speed Transmission Chip Mobile Phone Can be Connected USB3.1 Transmission Technology Suitable for Laptop, PC,16TB,Silver : Amazon.ca: Electronics



www.amazon.ca


----------



## BlueRocker (Jan 5, 2020)

I just bought 12 4tb SSD's - cost just over $15K. Like @Paul Running said these are not for real.


----------



## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

BlueRocker said:


> I just bought 12 4tb SSD's - cost just over $15K. Like @Paul Running said these are not for real.


seriously? $1250 for a 4TB SSD? holy shit


----------



## BlueRocker (Jan 5, 2020)

cheezyridr said:


> seriously? $1250 for a 4TB SSD? holy shit


They were enterprise drives for a 12 disk NAS array. You can find 4tb SSDs now for about $500 that are suitable for desktop computers.


----------



## Paul Running (Apr 12, 2020)




----------



## Paul Running (Apr 12, 2020)




----------



## SWLABR (Nov 7, 2017)

novarena said:


> Well, I can remember the price when those disks price was lower. Thanks to crypto mining last year, all prices for hard drives and even portable models went too high because these mining farms started to use the hard drives as the mining resource in place of the video cards.


Really? The cost of data storage has gone up? 

The very first flash drive I ever bought was 512m. That's half a gig!! and it was $90 in 2005. 

2 years ago I bought a 4tb external hard drive for $150.


----------



## Milkman (Feb 2, 2006)

Well, I guess not all drives are created equal.

I have a 1tb drive at an IT specialist now trying to recover data. The drive suddenly became "corrupted and unreadable".

He says he's starting to recover data but it's slow going.

WTF. You try to do the right thing and back up your data and then the back up goes for a shit.....


----------



## Paul Running (Apr 12, 2020)

Milkman said:


> I have a 4tb drive at an IT specialist now trying to recover data.


Is the data on a SSD?


----------



## Milkman (Feb 2, 2006)

Paul Running said:


> Is the data on a SSD?


Not sure. I'm no IT guy that's for sure.

This is the drive.

I googled it and it says it's a HDD.


----------



## DrumBob (Aug 17, 2014)

I think you meant skepticism.


----------



## Mark Brown (Jan 4, 2022)

Milkman said:


> Well, I guess not all drives are created equal.
> 
> I have a 1tb drive at an IT specialist now trying to recover data. The drive suddenly became "corrupted and unreadable".
> 
> ...


I double back up all my necessary data which is to say my corporate files. One on my PC and one air gapped, this way if one drive goes down all stops get pulled and I replace that drive then carry on. This is the best practice. Storing information is not a back up. If we count the fact that I have the information in an operational drive as well, I suppose that leaves me with 3 copies. 

Hard lessons were learned in the early days of running Raid 0 arrays and having 0 backups of data. Hard, hard lessons.


----------



## oldjoat (Apr 4, 2019)

didn't think people still kept more than one CURRENT backup ( other than me )

HD are cheap these days .
almost every night , backup to redundant internal HD .... OS to a SSD 
twix the 2 , its 10 mins to be up and running ( just swap some cables. ).


----------



## Mark Brown (Jan 4, 2022)

I don't keep a mirror drive of my OS, mostly because there is nothing in or on or about it that I really care about. I format once every 3-6 months, just because old habits die hard, but data I keep up to date and very well backed up. Anything of value is backed up twice. It is a simple practice like you say and it isn't like I can just trundle down to the store and get more of my Corporate records for the last 7 years if the tax man comes calling and I went all digital over 10 years ago so this to me seems like a decent thing. Other than that I have some pictures and some old music that is copied on 3 different drives. Storage capacity has never cheaper, again as you say.

Fun story.... I remember when I was around 13 or 14 and me and a buddy were walking to lunch one day and he exclaimed to me that "MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries" was something ridiculous like a 400mb install. I called him a liar as this seemed all but impossible to me. Then we proceeded to exclaim that "some day in the future" and we did not mean the near future, there would be Gigabyte drives.... then we had a good laugh. Then we dreamed this insane reality where you could hold a Terabyte drive... well you might as well have believed that men were going to live on Mars. Well, now I have a 2TB external drive that lives in a storage bucket and only cost me 99 dollars. The advances in this stuff is crazy.


----------



## oldjoat (Apr 4, 2019)

remember SSDD ?


----------



## Mark Brown (Jan 4, 2022)

oldjoat said:


> remember SSDD ?


It was a different world and it is amazing to look at the advances in the last 20 years. The first 30 or so were pretty slow going in all reality and well here we are now. We have been at a bit of a bottleneck for the past almost 10 years or so though. Not a complete standstill, but the advancement has been slowed down quite a bit. We have sort of reached the apex of our current architecture. 

I also remember paying something stupid like 900 dollars for 16gb of DDR2 ram, or something along those lines, back when they were price fixing the stuff in the late 90's. My memory is a little fuzzy on the specs, price and timing however so feel free to call me a liar


----------



## Paul M (Mar 27, 2015)

30 years ago I paid $50/meg to upgrade RAM on a 486 machine. I think I paid $1000.00 or so fir a 17" crt monitor.


----------

