[HN Gopher] Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New
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Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New
Author : walterbell
Score : 144 points
Date : 2025-11-12 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kozubik.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kozubik.com)
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| Marketplaces only work when the participants maintain a
| reputation. The buyer here is doing his part.
|
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707 (HDD
| shortage)
| epistasis wrote:
| First two lines of the article:
|
| >At rsync.net we have trusted suppliers with verified supply
| chains and a long history of providing reliable service.
|
| >However, from time to time, it is expedient to purchase parts
| from Amazon - something we do with care and suspicion.
|
| That seems like a very reasonable and non-crazy approach to
| using Amazon.
| greenavocado wrote:
| As I pointed out in another post if you are using ZFS RAID Z2
| you can use literal used garbage hard drives safely without
| risking data loss.
|
| ZFS helped me discover that my motherboard SATA chip can't
| handle 6 drives; I had to purchase a cheap Chinese PCI
| Express SATA controller to communicate with my drives
| reliably and error-free.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Not for special VDEVs, which is the explicit purpose here.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| You can mirror a slog... l2arc doesn't need a mirror
| because the data is already on disk. I believe a split
| metadata can also be mirrored.
| favorited wrote:
| That's correct. I ran a special metadata VDEV 3-way
| mirror using this NVMe PLX card for a while
| https://imgur.com/a/xiwzkA6
| seany wrote:
| You can dump any vdev you want in a special. I have 2x 3
| way mirrors in both of my nas boxes right now
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd be more worried about a supply chain attack with
| malicious devices.
| stavros wrote:
| What kind of supply chain attack can one mount with a
| disk?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| A malicious device plugged into your machine? The only
| limit is your imagination.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| This is how we operate at my job. We go through our trusted
| and reliable vendor, who gets us good pricing but doesn't
| always control shipping times. If it's urgent, Amazon will be
| delivered within 48 hrs.
| monocasa wrote:
| I mean, if you're a storage business, hopefully you've designed
| your architecture such that you assume drives will go bad, so
| you characterize the models of drive to make sure that not all
| the copies are on one manufacturer, and then you can take
| liberties finding the cheapest storage on the market. This only
| comes back to bite you when you didn't account for (because you
| didn't know) that there was decreased longevity, so your TCO
| calculation was off and you might not make as much money.
| rsync wrote:
| I agree with this.
|
| However, an even more fundamental philosophy behind any work
| that we do is "defense in depth" which means that _even
| after_ building the fault-tolerant, anti-fragile system, we
| also spend time and resources qualifying the inputs ...
|
| ... and then spend time and resources monitoring the outputs
| (error rates, failures, correlation, etc.).
|
| Any one of those pieces is, theoretically, sufficient.
| Layering the pieces in a defense in depth strategy is what
| gives us the _highly confident_ posture we enjoy.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I buy used enterprise hard drives that have been pushed hard.
| My current biggest NAS runs six used 14 terabyte enterprise
| hard drives and three have failed so far within a year. Each
| time I was able to get a warranty replacement and the
| replacement was in much better condition than the original ones
| I had. Zero data loss because of ZFS RAID Z2. I was able to
| measure the condition of the surface of the platters and other
| useful metadata using Victoria https://hdd.by/victoria/
| included on Hiren's BootCD PE.
| iberator wrote:
| Which manfucaturer is the best and worst one?
| crest wrote:
| Check the Backblaze quarterly reports.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I just get whatever is cheapest with a warranty of one or
| more years. RMA ability is most important when buying these
| kinds of heavily used decommissioned drives. ZFS RAID Z2 is
| absolutely key to preventing data loss here.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-
| for-q3-...
|
| > For those of you tracking the stats closely, you'll
| notice that the Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB) is a frequent
| flier on this list. The last time it had a failure was in
| Q3 2024--and it was just a single failure for the whole
| quarter!
| toast0 wrote:
| It almost doesn't matter. There's three choices for
| spinning drives and all storage devices fail (even SSDs),
| and you need a plan for that. There's variance in failure
| rates and warranty periods, but most (new) drives last the
| warranty period, and used drives is more complex than just
| manufacturer --- how were they used, stored, and handled
| before resale probably makes more difference than who made
| them.
|
| IMHO, it's more important to consider correlated failures
| rather than worry about getting the best or avoiding the
| worst drives. Try to avoid running an array that's built
| from same model, same firmware, same build time, same power
| on hours, same workload. Every so often, you get things
| like drive disappears when power on time overflows, or a
| manufacturing error that makes most drives fail after N
| weeks of use, having all of your drives in the same part of
| their lifecycle makes you more likely to experience a
| catastrophic failure that failure rate analysis wouldn't
| pick up.
|
| Picking SSDs carefully bears more fruit, there are many
| more makers and wider variance in performance and
| reliability as well as characteristics during failure:
| everyone says SSDs go read only during failure, but my
| experience has been that lots of SSDs disappear from their
| interfaces during failure; you might reasonably have less
| redundancy if you have confidence the SSD will remain
| readable for recovery if it fails.
| olavgg wrote:
| Do not buy Kioxia. If your drives dies after a few years,
| but can come back to life with an firmware update. They
| will not give it to you unless you have a support contract.
|
| Solidigm have all their firmware available for everyone
| their website.
| abanana wrote:
| _> blame the individual seller, rather than the marketplace_
|
| I'd have thought the fraud problems from "commingling" were
| well-enough known by now to avoid wanting to blame any specific
| Amazon Marketplace vendor, but perhaps not.
| Szpadel wrote:
| from time to time your trusted supplier might be out of stock
| and you need drivers quickly
|
| even backblaze bought drives in supermarket when there was HDD
| shortage
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| recursive wrote:
| 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?
| rsync wrote:
| "It's crazy to me that rsync.net is buying mission-critical
| enterprise drives on Amazon."
|
| We don't.
|
| "At rsync.net we have trusted suppliers with verified supply
| chains and a long history of providing reliable service."
|
| ...
|
| "However, from time to time, it is expedient to purchase parts
| from Amazon - something we do with care and suspicion."
|
| ... and that care and suspicion takes the form of physical and
| logical inspections and _extended_ part burn-in.
|
| As you can see, this QC process caught these mis-labeled parts.
| runjake wrote:
| Jumping on two add I've now had 2 experiences of buying
| counterfeit drives on Amazon from different sellers. I've
| probably ordered only 4 hard drives off of Amazon ever, so
| that's a 50% counterfeit rate.
|
| Both sellers issued refunds without trouble because I bought
| them under Prime. One seller seemed genuinely surprised they
| had a counterfeit in stock.
|
| Both of these counterfeit drives look very, very convincingly
| authentic, except the serial numbers don't match real ones and
| don't validate as real ones with the OEM.
|
| The first time, I actually argued with Seagate over it being
| real, until they pointed out that aside from the serial number
| not being in their databases, it's not even in the correct
| format for any of their drives.
|
| If you care about your drives and you're buying on Amazon, only
| buy under Prime. And when they're delivered, check the serial
| numbers with the OEM first thing (usually via warranty
| validation). Don't buy anything not on Prime.
| storus wrote:
| What are the reputable sellers these days? Wasn't there a
| recent German scandal where Seagate was selling used hard
| drives as new to its wholesalers?
| p1necone wrote:
| 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).
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| Yes, most of the used Amazon SATA Rotated Drive its do this
| with "fresh" data.
| turtletontine wrote:
| Is there any way to tell if the SMART has been reset/tampered
| with in any way? If you have a drive that claims to have 0
| hours of use, but it quickly starts to rack up failure
| indicators... how can you tell if it's spurious failures or a
| fraudulent tampered drive?
| beala wrote:
| Seagate has a proprietary version of SMART called FARM.
| It's supposed to be more tamper resistant than SMART, but
| it appears the fraudsters have figured out how to
| manipulate it too [1].
|
| The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform
| a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare
| the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the
| serial number against the manufacturers database if
| available is also a good precaution.
|
| These are probably things you should be doing whether or
| not the drive is allegedly new.
|
| [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Larger-
| disks-wi...
| nubinetwork wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Thousands of hours doesn't pass the smell test. There's no way
| a specific SSD goes through months of testing prior to sale. A
| couple of hours seems reasonable though. And I'd rather it not
| be easy to reset the counters, so they don't reset the counters
| after testing during manufacturing/burn-in.
| Syzygies wrote:
| "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.
| nekusar wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Janlaugh-Resistant-Laboratory-Permane...
|
| Alcohol/solvent resistant markers.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| But are they genuine and unused? !
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| One spray of brake cleaner and it's gone. Cheaper to use a
| carbide scribe or simply get a shard of glass or ceramic and
| physically scribe into the drive. Now they're permanently
| used drives, no debate is possible.
| observationist wrote:
| You can also remove sharpie writing using sharpies and a wet
| wipe - write over and wipe while its still wet. The dry pigment
| will dissolve in the solvent in the fresh ink.
| doubled112 wrote:
| My favourite trick is to write over Sharpie with a dry erase
| marker and erase it all.
| realusername wrote:
| They can do it but they likely won't bother at scale.
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's your takeaway?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Yep. They should've engraved it.
| lgats wrote:
| does amazon still do inventory co-mingling ?
| alwa wrote:
| That was my first thought too. Apparently they're "phasing it
| out" by "the end of this year" [0]
|
| I did not know, per that article, that Amazon had for some time
| now offered motivated third-party sellers a means to avoid
| commingling by applying a "fulfillment network SKU" barcode to
| their goods. And that they estimate merchants spend $600mm a
| year on that type of "restickering." Expensive, but possible.
|
| [0] https://www.geekwire.com/2025/after-years-of-backlash-
| amazon...
| khernandezrt wrote:
| Whats stopping a more clever company from resetting the smart
| data on an ssd and reselling?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| This is how it's done - name and shame!
|
| Without it, there isn't enough incentive to try and just eat the
| cost of a refund in the rare case they get caught.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Pre-tested, as it were?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Might've worked for HDDs, but SSDs have a cap on lifetime
| writes.
| benjojo12 wrote:
| Yes but also the drives in the OP have 4~ TB lifetime writes,
| basically nothing compared to the total capability of the
| drive, Given these drives can do 2TB+ a day for the entire
| warranty period a day, I don't think these drives are that
| bad, the amazon seller shouldn't have claimed they were new,
| but in terms of the flash wear, these drives look almost as
| good as new
| humanpotato wrote:
| Alcohol or lacquer thinner will remove Sharpie in no time. I use
| Sharpies as _temporary_ markers on smooth metal for this reason.
| antisthenes wrote:
| This drive model is 7 years old.
|
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| New old stock is a thing.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| First of all, neither of those WILD facts seem that wild to me.
|
| Intel did last orders for that drive Dec 30 2022. The article
| was written in April, so the author was conceivably purchasing
| drives that had sat on a shelf for a year and a half. That
| doesn't tickle alarm bells in my head.
|
| Secondly, maybe my scam detector isn't well tuned enough, but
| "Maestro Technologies" doesn't seem that much stranger than
| "Apple" or "Micro soft" or "Zoom" or "Snap." If it were
| XBBHHZZZAA, LLC, maybe I'd have more room for pause.
|
| The takeaway lesson here is that Amazon has become less and
| less reliable as a source for items. It's especially bad if
| it's purchased from a third party (something Amazon seems keen
| not to highlight on the purchase page), but even FBA is not
| free of trash. They straight up sell pirated N64 cartridges for
| example: https://www.amazon.com/Cartridge-Nintendo-
| Smash-64-Video-Ver...
| crest wrote:
| Good to see someone name and shame shady suppliers.
| johnboiles wrote:
| I got bit by this exact seller on Amazon earlier this year. "New"
| drive had SMART power-on time of 25371 hours.
|
| * 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
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Why was it taken down? That's so messed up!
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