I canceled Amazon Prime last month given that I’ve lost all trust in getting a functioning version of whatever I’ve ordered. This is some next-level shit.
If this is what I think it is, the hard drives are used data centre drives that are sold as “renewed”. They wipe the drives then use manufacturer’s tools to reset the clocks, effectively the same as winding back the mileage clock in a car. They are sold cheaper than new drives, but not really at a price that reflects their age and true used status.
I bought 4x 14TB drives of this type, pretty sure they were listed as new, although some show as used. 1 drive was DOA and I’m still waiting on the refund.
You can see tons of them on diskprices.com
Edit: oh wait, this is a different scam. This is like a combination of the classic size scam with the data centre scam. Fun!
It’s probably related to Amazon’s practice of binning all products with the same barcode together. So when someone sells something through Amazon their products get bundled with everyone else’s, and when someone buys they get one from the bundle. A counterfeiter basically poisons the stock, and you end up with counterfeiters selling legit products and legit sellers selling the counterfeit ones.
This has been a problem on Amazon for ages. Unless you can confirm the seller on the Amazon listing is authentic, you should never buy any storage devices on Amazon, ever.
It doesn’t even matter if it’s a trusted seller. Amazon puts their returned items back with the new products and they stock the items from every seller together. You can have 10 sellers with a genuine item and 1 with a counterfeit item and have a chance of getting the counterfeit item from any of them because they all share the same stock.
We need to petition them to change their name to Scamazon.
Or Amazon’t.
Is there a text version? Or if someone watched the video, are these drives sold by Amazon or by third party sellers?
Amazon is notorious for combining stock, “the seller” often doesn’t matter.
Amazon needs to take some responsibility for the products they sell. This is unacceptable.
If I open a store in my town and start selling fake crap I can’t go and say “sorry not my fault I’m just a reseller you need to deal with the guy who sold it to me” I will be brought to court and loose why is Amazon allowed to sell fakes and non UL complient equipment?
I suspect their argument would be that they are more like a flea market. If you buy something fake or faulty at a flea market then the flea market probably isn’t liable, the seller is. Now, I don’t think this argument holds water, especially in light of Amazon’s practice of combining all of the stock of a single product into one place, regardless of who the seller is, so that there’s no way to know if you’ll actually get product from that seller.
Yikes. Back to Newegg for me!
Newegg is inundated with 3rd party sellers so it’s basically a crapshoot as well.
Sadly yep. Micro Center is just about the only PC component supplier I’ll buy from nowadays, but I have to drive like 4 hours to get to my nearest one
Oh, the irony that enshittification has led to not trusting online tech firms to sell tech items online.
Checking in from Vancouver Island. Nearest one is 26hrs away.
I did love them when I was living in California and could be there in an hour. Now I take my chances with online sellers like Amazon.
I haven’t had a prime sub in 5 years. It’s not been worth it in a while.
What good is the convenience of having everything on the same website if I have to determine if it’s fake or not?
