Did I Win the Worst SSD Lottery?

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DeadlyAura

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 6, 2005
Messages
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Hey all, I picked up at T430 from a buddy whose company no longer needed it after moving to cloud servers. The system was in production up to the day he gave it to me. The only thing he did was remove the drives.

I purchased 4, brand new Samsung Evo 870s from NewEgg and installed them in the server. I can configure a RAID 10 array, initialize it, and install the operating system (Server 2019). However, when it reboots, it gets to "initializing firmware interfaces" and proceeds to show that 3 of the 4 SSDs have failed.

I have tried:

Reseating the drives
Updating BIOS
Updating RAID controller firmware
Swapping positions of the drives (the "failed" states follow the drive itself, not the position)
Swapping drive bays entirely (Moved drives from bays 0,1,2,3 to bays 8,9,10,11)
Removing the RAID controller, all cables, backplane, etc. cleaning all connections and reinstalling them
Moving the RAID controller to another PCI slot

Regardless of this, the same 3 disks show as "failed" upon trying to do a first boot of the OS.

When I power down completely, and cold boot the system, all 4 drives show "ok" but the array does not contain bootable data / is degraded and has to be rebuilt.

After all of this, it would appear to me that I have 3 defective drives out of the box. However, I am EXTREMELY skeptical as I have NEVER had a Samsung Evo fail me, let alone be bad out of the box. And, for 75% of the drives to be defective out of the box, I feel like the odds of that are lower than winning the Powerball.

Am I missing something here?
 
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cable issue, also could be a firmware issue with the raid card, consumer sata drives vs sas drives can cause strange issues.
Whats the part # on the raid controller?
 
stormy1 said:
cable issue, also could be a firmware issue with the raid card, consumer sata drives vs sas drives can cause strange issues.
Whats the part # on the raid controller?
Click to expand...
PERC H730 running firmware 25.5.9.0001
stormy1 said:
cable issue, also could be a firmware issue with the raid card, consumer sata drives vs sas drives can cause strange issues.
Whats the part # on the raid controller?
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While I agree with you, I've NEVER had an issue with Samsung Evo drives in a Dell server. Could it be the issue this time? Yes. But I don't THINK the drives are the issue.
pendragon1 said:
drive firmware up to date too?
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I don't think I updated drive firmware... I'll check on that.
 
1690042317855.png
 
Sounds like you have a bad card, a bad power supply or a bad SFF-8643 cable.
 
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Just getting back to this now.

Did discover that the one "good" drive does have a different firmware version than the others. Working on updating them now to see if that helps. If not, I'll assume bad drives and start the RMA process.
 
While trying to process an RMA through NewEgg, I found this:

Screenshot_20230723-124117.png



Seems like the seller through NewEgg is selling fraudulent items.

Edit: RMA request is being instantly denied. Will need to call customer support during the week. Going to check the serial #s later and see if these are genuine drives or not.
 
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Yikes, 3rd party sellers are bad news... Newegg, Amazon everywhere :(. Sorry you got burnt! Try calling Newegg during the week if their system is automatically declining you.
 
mwroobel said:
Oooh, looks like you got Marketplaced! On Newegg and Amazon, only choose listings where it is listed to be both SOLD by and SHIPPED Newegg or Amazon, not anything else.
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Honestly, I haven't used NewEgg in so long, that I had no idea they were using 3rd party sellers...
 
Marketplace is OK with good sellers. ALWAYS check their ratings.
ALWAYS use a credit card too.
 
Does anyone know where I could enter my Samsung serial# to verify authenticity?

Magician won't even detect the 3 dead drives.
 
DeadlyAura said:
I tried that, but according to the website, the Serial #s should be 15 digits, and my serial #s are only 14 digits. I'm ASSUMING that means they are fraudulent, but I was just checking all available resources since NewEgg keeps denying my RMA request.

This is what I'm currently dealing with:
View attachment 585446
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That looks like a bot. Call Samsung and check the sn on the drives (probably fraudulent), then call Newegg. Your issue is too much to ask of an automated system. :) EDIT: Newegg phone is here: https://kb.newegg.com/knowledge-base/call-customer-service/
 
Well, the lady was nice enough. Processed the RMA without issue. She didn't seem very concerned about a fraudulent seller (who now has 3x 1 star reviews referencing fraudulent drives).

Not sure where else to go from here, but it will probably be the last time I buy from NewEgg.
 
Yeah first thing I always do when on newegg is select sold by newegg to filter out all the 3rd party sellers. I wouldnt trust most of these third party sellers any further than I can toss them.
 
Seems like NewEgg MAY be addressing issues with the seller. The Evo 879 drives now show "out of stock" with this particular seller. Hoping that means NewEgg is doing something, and not that a ton of people got scammed...
 

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Starfalcon said:
Yeah first thing I always do when on newegg is select sold by newegg to filter out all the 3rd party sellers. I wouldnt trust most of these third party sellers any further than I can toss them.
Click to expand...

Except for the thing where Newegg disables your selection of only listing items sold and shipped by them EVERY TIME you go into a different subsection. If you go from looking at say RAM to motherboards, video cards, SSDs, etc. that little switch is turned off every single time. They actively try and force you to buy from marketplace sellers. They're bottom feeding scumbags.

DeadlyAura said:
Looks like NewEgg finally did something.
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No, they didn't. They just removed one of dozens or hundreds of accounts that individual Chinese sellers use. When one account gets banned or blocked, they just register a new one under a different name. There's no vetting process, they often just add numbers after their original name so that ScamSeller turns into ScamSeller02.

Don't worry, the seller will be back on the platform in a matter of hours or days under a different name. Chinese sellers change their names and locations all the time to skirt around being removed from platforms.

Newegg, Amazon, Walmart, etc. don't care what is being sold on their platforms as long as they get their cut of the sale. They do no vetting or policing of their own marketplace and let counterfeit and dangerous goods flow freely.
 
Deadjasper said:
Best to avoid Newegg all together.
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Doesn't matter where you go, all of the online marketplaces are plagued with counterfeit merchandise.

Some people say "well Amazon is better", no, they're not. I've ordered software on Amazon, where Amazon represented it as being sold by them and officially blessed by the software vendor. Then the shipment takes an abnormally long time and eventually in the mail, you get a smeared xeroxed product key.

Then there's bait and switch scams that are rampant. One big example are laptop power adapters. Seller lists an official power adapter with pictures of said power adapter, and instead ships you a counterfeit "REPLACEMENT AC ADAPTER" that's chineseium garbage.

And of course very obvious scams like the one from the OP, where scammers wipe their ass with the Lanham Act and make fake products under the moniker of a reputable company.
 
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