Why does used enterprise SSD pricing make no sense?

Been pricing storage for a new scrubbing layer. Samsung PM1733 7.68TB NVMe, datacenter pull, $340 on eBay. Brand new 8TB consumer QLC from any retail shelf? $380-420. Same NAND generation. The enterprise drive has power loss protection, 3 DWPD for 5 years, full SMART telemetry.

The gap used to be 3-4x. Now it is barely 15%. Either enterprise gear is flooding secondary markets or consumer margins went insane. Anyone tracking where these PM1733s originate? Seeing hundreds of identical serial prefixes, same firmware, same 28,000 hour power-on counts. That is not a random e-waste stream. That is a coordinated retirement.

Need 24 drives for a 2-node anycast filtering pair. At these prices I might just skip consumer entirely and take the DWPD.

Someone else's computer retired a million of these last year. The ethernet between your wallet and common sense is broken if you pay retail for flash now.

Back in the T-1 era we leased storage by the megabyte and the telco owned the spindles. Now you kids buy shucked external enclosures and wonder why the firmware lies about SMART. Those PM1733s are fiber cables and all from the same colo lease return. One hyperscaler dumped a pallet, the broker split it across a dozen ebay storefronts.

Check the model string. If it ends -0000 it is a custom firmware lock. If it is -001B you can reformat the block size and use it proper. The -0000 ones only talk to their old backplane and you are buying a brick with pretty heatsinks.

I moved a pallet of these last month. 42U rack, 4 nodes, 24 U.2 bays per node. The PM1733s came out of a Contabo lease that got refreshed to Gen5. Power draw on the v3 is 25W active, 5W idle. The v5 pulls 12W active. At 10c kWh that is $13/year per drive difference. Nothing, but at 96 drives per rack it adds to cooling load.

The serial prefix you are seeing is probably KOI-2023Q2 or similar. Vultr dumped a lot of gear through Hetzner's asset recovery. They do not wipe, they crypto-erase and let you deal with 520 byte sectors. Plan for a reformat pass. Shipping was 18 drives per foam tray, 6 trays per pallet. Whole lot went to a broker in Phoenix who split them.

Assume compromise on any drive with unknown provenance. Your threat model must include supply chain implant. Blast radius of a firmware-level payload is the full anycast filtering layer. Attack surface includes the management plane you use to reformat.

• Zero trust the SMART data.
• Zero trust the firmware revision.
• Zero trust the eBay seller's wipe claim.

If you cannot verify the secure erase certificate against the original owner, you are accepting risk into your scrubbing infrastructure.

I have seen retired datacenter gear with persistent BMC implants survive reformat. The SSD controller is a smaller target but not a zero target. Section your purchase. Buy two from three brokers. Cross-flash firmware from vendor recovery tools only. Isolate first power-on to a sacrificial ethernet segment with no route to production.

What's the DWPD on the v5 though

Consumer margins went insane, full stop

PM1735 v5 is 1 DWPD on the 7.68TB. Samsung moved to lower endurance with higher overprovisioning. The v3 was 3 DWPD. For a scrubbing layer doing write-heavy dedupe it matters. For read-mostly anycast filtering probably not.

The v5 also dropped the dual-port NVMe. Single port only. If you are doing HA at the drive level instead of node level, that is a regression.

Already accounted for. My scrubbing layer is FreeBSD with geli on top, but 520 byte sectors mean I need to run

camcontrol format

The 28,000 hours is 3.2 years at 24/7. At 3 DWPD that is 26 PB written. Still 74% life remaining by SMART. These drives have another decade in my use case.

Anyone know if the -0000 firmware lock blocks sector size changes? Some Samsung custom strings lock format permissions.

Same situation here in Mumbai. Local distributors want INR 42,000 for 8TB consumer NVMe. The eBay PM1733 with shipping and customs lands around INR 29,000. Gap is even worse outside US/EU. I bought six last month, all KOI prefix, all reformatted clean.

The customs declaration game is real. "Used computer parts" gets hit with 18% GST. "Enterprise storage samples" sometimes slips through at 12%. YMMV.

Not margins. Market segmentation. The NAND fabs run one process, the controller and firmware determine the SKU. Samsung sells the same silicon three times: mobile, client, datacenter. The client price is what the market will bear because Amazon and Best Buy shoppers do not cross-shop eBay for pulled enterprise gear.

The hyperscalers stopped buying 3 DWPD. They moved to 1 DWPD or QLC with massive spare area. The 3 DWPD stock is stranded inventory. That is your $340.