Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New
kozubik.com

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181 points

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walterbell

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25 days ago

83 comments

johnboiles ・ 24 days ago

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

  • joecool1029 ・ 24 days ago

    Might as well complain to DA or fill out the complaint form with the state AG about it. Cali has had a few rulings in past few years putting liability on Amazon for 3rd party sellers. Previous discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010976

  • Mistletoe ・ 24 days ago

    Why was it taken down? That’s so messed up!

    • a57721 ・ 24 days ago

      I had a similar experience. When I bought a device with faulty electronic components on Amazon, I wrote a negative review, and almost immediately I was notified that it had been flagged and removed for violating the "community guidelines". Apparently, a seller can do that. My review was a polite explanation of the issues, obviously not violating anything and not accusing the seller of anything, but now I'm sure they had refurbished units or a batch that was known to be faulty.

    • jjav ・ 23 days ago

      Common with amazon!

      I bought a DSLR camera a few years ago on amazon, and what showed up was an old very clearly used camera with thousands of photos taken (shutter counter) and parts missing, in a torn box. Really?

      I returned it, thankfully easy refund. But I wrote a matter-of-fact review, zero ranting, just stating that this vendor is selling used equipment advertised as new. Amazon immediately took the review down. They will do anything to protect the scam vendors.

      I no longer buy any electronics worth more than ~$50 on amazon, I go to reputable vendors instead.

  • 8cvor6j844qw_d6 ・ 24 days ago

    I got burned once with low quality storage (seems fake, can't tell), prefer retail stores for these kind of purchase.

LeifCarrotson ・ 25 days ago

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.

  • epistasis ・ 25 days ago

    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.

    • 0x1ch ・ 25 days ago

      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.

    • greenavocado ・ 25 days ago

      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_ ・ 25 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        Not for special VDEVs, which is the explicit purpose here.

        • nubinetwork ・ 25 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          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.

          • seany ・ 24 days ago

            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 ・ 25 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        I'd be more worried about a supply chain attack with malicious devices.

        • stavros ・ 25 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          What kind of supply chain attack can one mount with a disk?

          • 2OEH8eoCRo0 ・ 25 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            A malicious device plugged into your machine? The only limit is your imagination.

            • DANmode ・ 24 days ago

              Yep. Drive firmware is the attack vector, here, for anyone Googling or ChatGPT-ing along.

  • Aurornis ・ 25 days 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.

    • o11c ・ 24 days ago

      > 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.

    • imtringued ・ 24 days ago

      >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.

      The thing you're looking for is a single line of text, often in gray color, saying "Amazon" and it's usually below the "Dispatches from Amazon" "Amazon".

      Unlike Ebay, Amazon puts zero effort into making sure you know who you are buying from. If you are a first time buyer, you will not look for this one line that tells you, your risk of a scam is closer to 100% than 0%.

    • tgsovlerkhgsel ・ 25 days ago

      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 ・ 24 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        > 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.

        • hex4def6 ・ 24 days ago

          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.

    • recursive ・ 24 days ago

      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?

  • greenavocado ・ 25 days ago

    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.

    • immibis ・ 24 days ago

      HDDs and SSDs have different failure profiles - HDDs have random failures (with increasing probability as they age, but old ones can still work), whereas SSDs wear out at a somewhat predictable rate (there are no really old working ones unless they were only lightly used).

    • iberator ・ 25 days ago

      Which manfucaturer is the best and worst one?

      • toast0 ・ 25 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        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.

        • greenavocado ・ 24 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          You have to be careful here; mismatched drives can tank array performance.

          • toast0 ・ 24 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            It's all tradeoffs. For my personal use, array performance would have to be terrible for me to notice, but durability is important. I've run systems at work where durability isn't required, but performance is.

            If you run a fully matched array, you may well get better performance, but you also may wake up one day to all your disks disappeared. There's other ways for all your disks to disappear too, but same firmware, same firmware bug feels more preventable than power supply failed very hot.

            • greenavocado ・ 20 days ago

              I mean in basic terms like 5400 vs 7200 rpm spinning rust

      • olavgg ・ 24 days ago

        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.

      • greenavocado ・ 25 days ago

        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.

      • crest ・ 25 days ago

        Check the Backblaze quarterly reports.

  • abanana ・ 25 days ago

    > 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.

  • rsync ・ 25 days ago

    "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 ・ 25 days ago

    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.

    • runjake ・ 24 days ago

      Sorry for the typos. I swear it wasn't typoed that way when I clicked submit. Should be:

      Jumping onto this, I've now had 2 experiences of buying counterfeit drives on Amazon from different sellers.

  • monocasa ・ 25 days ago

    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 ・ 25 days ago

      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.

  • storus ・ 24 days ago

    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?

    • hulitu ・ 24 days ago

      There are none. I bought, some years ago an HP laptop from HP on Amazon. Keyboard had a key (keypad right) that will come out when you press it. I tried to make a negative review on Amazon but Amazon wouldn't let me publish it because "guidelines". I think it contained the word "broken".

      Since then, I only buy cheap crap (smartphone cases) from Amazon or things which are not available in other stores, as few as I can.

  • Szpadel ・ 25 days ago

    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

Syzygies ・ 25 days ago

"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.

  • observationist ・ 25 days ago

    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 ・ 25 days ago

      My favourite trick is to write over Sharpie with a dry erase marker and erase it all.

  • realusername ・ 25 days ago

    They can do it but they likely won't bother at scale.

  • azinman2 ・ 25 days ago

    That’s your takeaway?

    • huhtenberg ・ 24 days ago

      Yep. They should've engraved it.

nubinetwork ・ 25 days ago

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 ・ 25 days ago

    > 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.

    • nubinetwork ・ 24 days ago

      WD golds are platter drives, at least they were at the time...

      • toast0 ・ 24 days ago

        Oh, well they don't burn in those for months either :P

        And I guess I assumed SSD cause we're on an SSD topic. I think WD uses their color branding for both types of drives though.

indigodaddy ・ 25 days ago

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.

  • huhtenberg ・ 24 days ago

    Might've worked for HDDs, but SSDs have a cap on lifetime writes.

    • benjojo12 ・ 24 days ago

      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

khernandezrt ・ 25 days ago

Whats stopping a more clever company from resetting the smart data on an ssd and reselling?

p1necone ・ 25 days ago

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 ・ 25 days ago

    Yes, most of the used Amazon SATA Rotated Drive its do this with "fresh" data.

    • turtletontine ・ 25 days ago

      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 ・ 25 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        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...

        • galaxy_gas ・ 24 days ago

          Many of this have serial number stripped out , firwmare changed in addition to it

          SEarch Water Panther, MDD Enterprise

lgats ・ 25 days ago

does amazon still do inventory co-mingling ?

  • alwa ・ 25 days ago

    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...

quiet35 ・ 24 days ago

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.

e40 ・ 24 days ago

We switched from amazon.com to bhphoto.com for hard drives. I trust B&H Photo, and have used them for decades.

humanpotato ・ 25 days ago

Alcohol or lacquer thinner will remove Sharpie in no time. I use Sharpies as temporary markers on smooth metal for this reason.

tgsovlerkhgsel ・ 25 days ago

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.

crest ・ 25 days ago

Good to see someone name and shame shady suppliers.

antisthenes ・ 25 days ago

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.

  • hex4def6 ・ 25 days ago

    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...

    • antisthenes ・ 24 days ago

      > Intel did last orders for that drive Dec 30 2022.

      Intel didn't. Solidigm did. If the author was buying the Intel drive, it was at least 4 years old since they spun SSDs out in 2021.

      > 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."

      Yes, it isn't.

      > The takeaway lesson here is that Amazon has become less and less reliable as a source for items.

      That problem is over a decade old. Even normies I talk to are aware of it.

      • hex4def6 ・ 24 days ago

        > Intel didn't. Solidigm did. If the author was buying the Intel drive, it was at least 4 years old since they spun SSDs out in 2021.

        Firstly, the time between the SK Hynix acquisition (Dec 30 21) and the date of this article is 3 years 4 months, not "at least 4 years".

        Secondly, of whether the facility was owned by Intel or Solidigm at the time the drive was manufactured, the Intel PCN states last buy dates of Dec 30 2022 here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/8055...

          The *Intel* SKUs listed in the products affected table will End of life ... Please determine your remaining demand for the products listed in the "Products Affected/Intel Ordering Codes" ... While *Intel* will make commercially reasonable efforts to support last time order quantities ...
        It's entirely possible they did a large last-time factory build of drives in anticipation of people wanting to purchase them.

        Or, as Solidigm state on their FAQ:(https://www.solidigm.com/support-page/faqs.html):

          Why do some Solidigm products have *Intel labels*, order forms, and branding?
  Certain business elements that were already in place or in development prior to the creation of Solidigm will continue to bear Intel labels and branding for some time.
        It's probably that the drives would have been branded "Intel" significantly beyond the Intel / Solidigm acquisition date (Probably until their EOL which was a year later -- it would make no sense to rebrand them). And it seems entirely unreasonable to assume that even a fairly tuned in customer would be digging to that level of scrutiny ("Wait a second! This is still Intel branded! Solidigm rebranded this line in XX of '22, X months before they discontinued them. These must be used drives!")
  • 1970-01-01 ・ 25 days ago

    New old stock is a thing.