A couple of weeks ago I posted NANDstand in the Enterprise SSD “small deals” thread. While building it, I found an oddly worded lot of "X7 Samsung SM863a 960GB" for $275 total. Note the "X7" which indicated qty = 7.
All seven arrived with greater than 90% health. 4 of them now run NANDstand itself in a 2x2 ZFS mirror, and the other 3 are mirrored in my main file server as special vdev with small blocks on them.
That listing was the eye-opener: searching eBay for “SM863” and sorting by lowest price made $80–$90 single drives look like the cheapest options, while the unusually described lot was effectively invisible. Once NANDstand normalized the quantity and total capacity, it landed at the bottom of the $/TB chart.
That became the premise for two related tools:
- NANDstand (NANDstand — fresh flash, off the stand) - enterprise SSD listings normalized by quantity, capacity, interface, and price per TB. Also has spinners per a request here on STH.
- DIMMsum (DIMMsum — used server RAM price tracker) - server-memory listings normalized by stick count, capacity per DIMM, DDR generation, speed, module type, and price per GB.
The feedback from the original STH thread was useful immediately. Members found several ugly multi-quantity and variation-listing cases, plus missing pagination and sorting. Those issues have since been addressed, but messy eBay listings remain an endless edge-case generator so I’d appreciate more testing from people who actually buy this hardware (me included, I am no stranger to the deals/buy/sell threads on STH. 3 of my best purchases were an Intel P4608 6.4TB for $200 and also 2x Micron 7300 Pro 3.2GB for I think it was $150 each, but that was ages ago when prices were more reasonable).
Disclosure: outbound eBay links are affiliate links. They do not change the buyer’s price and help cover the cost of operating the sites (mainly the LLM inferencing to pull out listing details).
All seven arrived with greater than 90% health. 4 of them now run NANDstand itself in a 2x2 ZFS mirror, and the other 3 are mirrored in my main file server as special vdev with small blocks on them.
That listing was the eye-opener: searching eBay for “SM863” and sorting by lowest price made $80–$90 single drives look like the cheapest options, while the unusually described lot was effectively invisible. Once NANDstand normalized the quantity and total capacity, it landed at the bottom of the $/TB chart.
That became the premise for two related tools:
- NANDstand (NANDstand — fresh flash, off the stand) - enterprise SSD listings normalized by quantity, capacity, interface, and price per TB. Also has spinners per a request here on STH.
- DIMMsum (DIMMsum — used server RAM price tracker) - server-memory listings normalized by stick count, capacity per DIMM, DDR generation, speed, module type, and price per GB.
The feedback from the original STH thread was useful immediately. Members found several ugly multi-quantity and variation-listing cases, plus missing pagination and sorting. Those issues have since been addressed, but messy eBay listings remain an endless edge-case generator so I’d appreciate more testing from people who actually buy this hardware (me included, I am no stranger to the deals/buy/sell threads on STH. 3 of my best purchases were an Intel P4608 6.4TB for $200 and also 2x Micron 7300 Pro 3.2GB for I think it was $150 each, but that was ages ago when prices were more reasonable).
Disclosure: outbound eBay links are affiliate links. They do not change the buyer’s price and help cover the cost of operating the sites (mainly the LLM inferencing to pull out listing details).
