
Disk Prices on Amazon - apsec112
https://diskprices.com/
======
Rapzid
Anecdote. I swore off spinning disks for my PC years ago, but I've been a bit
cheap and recently got fed up with my 500GB "storage" drive always being near
full and my work VM as well :/ So I finally went onto Google to look into
storage and was absolutely, postively, shocked that I somehow missed the whole
m.2 nvme surge. So much so that I got a 1TB 970 EVO for just $170. Nearly 500k
random IOPS with qd32, and 3.5GB/s and 2.5GB/s sequential read/write?! Yes
please.

I was even able to jump through hoops to get bitlocker working with hardware
encryption, so I'm getting full disk encryption at nearly spec speeds.
Awesomeness.

EDIT: It's a shame the situation with RAID controller software, drivers, and
physical controllers is such a crap show ATM. Doing anything "enterprise" with
them seems a bit of a cluster F ATM. Anyone know what's up with that?

~~~
StavrosK
Does NVMe make a difference over SATA2? Isn't the latter plenty fast anyway?
I've been holding off on upgrading because it doesn't seem like I'd see a
benefit.

~~~
lizknope
SATA2 is really old. The SATA revisions are:

SATA1 - 1.5Gb/s SATA2 - 3.0Gb/s SATA3 - 6.0Gb/s

SATA3 is often referred to as SATA6G although because of 8b/10b encoding
overhead you a SATA6G link maxes out at 4.8Gb/s

There are many NVMe SSDs that use 4 lanes of PCI-E Gen 3 which is just under
32Gb/s

If you read this review you can see read speeds of 3500MB/s which is 28Gb/s or
just under the 32Gb/s limit.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13761/the-samsung-970-evo-
plu...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13761/the-samsung-970-evo-plus-ssd-
review)

I am using lowercase "b" for bit and capital "B" for byte

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, maybe my disk is using SATA3 then, I have an Evo and a not-ancient
motherboard. However, I'm wondering whether I'll see a practical difference in
my day to day workloads, which is mostly web development and no gaming.

~~~
barrkel
IMO - not really. You might if you're memory constrained and you're doing
analysis of logs or something like that.

~~~
StavrosK
That's what I figure as well, thank you.

------
sn
We stopped buying drives from Amazon when we got drives for "the wrong region"
and couldn't RMA them.

NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives. Provantage is
another reputable vendor that usually has decent prices.

If you're local to the SF bay area, check out Central Computers. King Star USA
also works if you're a business customer making a large purchase.

~~~
cnst
I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon. Their Fulfilled-
by-Amazon (FBA) idea was quite a game changer, but the implementation with the
inventory co-mingling is something that I'd much rather stay away from as a
consumer.

There's been oh-so-many reports that even if you're buying from the official
store of any known brand, with FBA, then you might as well still receive a
knock-off, due to the inventory co-mingling issue. Have they ever resolved
this for good, or is noone really bothers to even pay any attention to this
anymore?

~~~
gambiting
>>I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon. Their
Fulfilled-by-Amazon (FBA) idea was quite a game changer, but the
implementation with the inventory co-mingling is something that I'd much
rather stay away from as a consumer.

As far as I know it doesn't happen in the UK at all. I have placed 200+ orders
with Amazon in last year alone and haven't had any issues except for a couple
deliveries which were a day late(Amazon extended my prime by a month each
time). 99% of my deliveries arrive in 1 day as promised. They have exemplary
customer service as well. In a way, I don't understand why you'd buy from
anyone else but amazon :P

~~~
pingyong
I wonder if this knock-off problem I keep reading about is something specific
to the US. I've ordered ~200 things over the last 3 years from Amazon, and
I've never received a knock-off either. I've never even heard of that
happening outside of internet comments. Plus sending things back to Amazon is
usually fairly trivial.

~~~
wyldfire
How would you know whether what you received was authentic?

~~~
astura
For example, one wouldn't know their bike helmet was a knockoff unless they
had fallen and hit their head.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/09/16/647377213/fake-bike-
helmets-c...](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/16/647377213/fake-bike-helmets-
cheap-but-dangerous)

------
mNovak
Setting aside the issue of counterfeits on Amazon, this is really nice. Clear,
simple, functional and allows you to explore the space not just comparison
shop for a specific item.

I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like
computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.

~~~
OJFord
Amazon's sort just flat out doesn't work, I don't understand it, it's
obviously not incompetence (and anyone can call a std lib `sort` fn on a given
field anyway) so I don't understand why it's an option, why it pretends that
sorting by price is something that you can do.

It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee,
which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even
including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume
it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a
crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too
much of my money, but the site really is crap.

~~~
catalogia
I was at an Amazon all-hands years ago (I haven't worked there for years) and
I saw an employee ask Bezos what Amazon was going to do about the poor quality
of search. Bezos brushed off the criticism and said the search team did good
work.

I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different
priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.

~~~
senderista
I was there too when someone asked why Google seemed to always have better
search results for Amazon.com than Amazon itself, and I remember he said that
if you always start searching on Amazon and only fall back to Google when you
don't like Amazon's results, you'll notice when Amazon has poor results and
Google has good results, but not the reverse. Something of a copout perhaps,
but I thought it was an astute observation.

~~~
swiley
Honestly it’s really good to hear it’s not intentionally bad.

I wish there was a way to just download the catalog and query/search/sort it
myself though.

~~~
catalogia
> _I wish there was a way to just download the catalog and query /search/sort
> it myself though._

That would be nice and not _entirely_ without precedent, since you can
download some of IMDB's catalogue (owned by Amazon since 1998.) However I
suspect this feature is a vestigial remnant of IMDB's earlier days on Usenet.

[https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/](https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/)

~~~
swiley
There are other e-commerce sites: Sparkfun let you do this until a few years
ago, I think you still can with digikey.

------
MrGilbert
I find it interesting how stable HDDs are in terms of price.

I just cross-checked with german "Geizhals"[1], and the 4 TB Seagate IronWolf
(ST4000VN008) started at ~160€ in Sep. 2016, quickly fell to 140€ a few days
later, and then slowly descended to 105€ in Jan. 2018 - and that's the region
it's been sitting there for two years now. The UK price chart looks almost the
same.[2]

[1]: [https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-
st4000vn008...](https://geizhals.de/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-
st4000vn008-a1504505.html)

[2]: [https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-
st4000v...](https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-ironwolf-nas-hdd-4tb-
st4000vn008-a1504505.html)

~~~
londons_explore
Nobody puts any R&D into new drive technologies. If demand drops, factories
close since they are producing at near zero margin. All R&D costs are already
amortized or written off.

End result: Static prices.

The only time prices will change is when only one manufacturer is left and
they jack the prices as a monopoly on antique tech that a few big companies
still need. We're a long way from that tho.

~~~
rasz
>producing at near zero margin

:))
[https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin](https://ycharts.com/companies/STX/gross_profit_margin)

SSDs are unsuitable for long term storage, technology is simply incapable
(cells losing charge, normal usage physically degrading medium, limited number
or charges per cell). We dont have anything better than spinning magnetic
medium at the moment, and nothing viable on the horizon.

~~~
londons_explore
> cells losing charge

Leave it powered up and let the controller re-write the data every year or so
automatically.

>normal usage physically degrading medium

For 'read-only' data that is rewritten once per year to compensate for cells
loosing charge, you can expect a lifetime over 10,000 years.

Sure, some SSD's available today wont handle the above cases properly and data
will be lost, but it is not a theoretically unsolvable issue.

~~~
rasz
1 more like every 30 days [https://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-
releases-firmwar...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-releases-
firmware-update-to-fix-the-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-bug)

2 No such thing as read only SSD. Just like in ram, SSDs experience read
disturbance (rowhammer) [https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-read-
disturb-err...](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-read-disturb-
errors_dsn15.pdf)

"A key contributor to this reduced reliability is read disturb, where a read
to one row of cells impacts the threshold voltages of unread flash cells in
different rows of the same block. Such disturbances may shift the threshold
voltages of these unread cells to different logical states than originally
programmed, leading to read errors that hurt endurance"

The very best SSDs today promise to go into read only mode in case of a
failure, and in tests almost none are. Intel server family of drives famously
brick itself despite stating "read only" in documentation.

------
kabdib
At least [edit:] three of the 4TB drives I checked was categorized as "new"
but was in fact reburbished ("with a new warranty"). One of them was pretty
shady about hiding this fact.

[Life is too short and data is too dear to ever buy one of these refurb units]

------
joshstrange
If you are trying to build a NAS or similar then my suggestion is go with
shucked WD EasyStore externals, you need to either use molex to sata power to
bypass the 2.2v issue or tape the pin but they are WD Whites inside and work
very well from my experience. I just keep waiting for the 14TB's to fall a
little further so I can replace one of my 5TB parity drives with that so I can
grow my array.

~~~
ajphdiv
I think I hear /r/DataHoarder/ calling you.

~~~
joshstrange
Oh, they have me hook, line, and sinker haha. Them along with /r/homelab and
/r/unraid

------
syphilis2
Wow, SSD prices bounced back after December. I think most people were (and
still are) expecting $100/TB to be the new baseline.

[https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...](https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=search)

~~~
Macha
From a Gamers Nexus news video near the start of the year - apparently some of
these companies shifted some production to RAM due to high demand from new
consoles and high end phones.

------
nullc
Anyone know of one that can display a sorted price per GB _with an offset_?
E.g. so you can put in a marginal cost per additional SATA port and get
corrected figures?

Saving 5 dollars on drives by using 30 3TB drives instead of 6 15TB drives
isn't a win in terms of pricing when you consider the total cost.

~~~
ZoomZoomZoom
Also, an option to penalize excessively huge drives would be nice too. For the
same price per GB I'd rather buy 2 8TB drives than 1 16TB.

~~~
lostlogin
It’s cheaper per TB to buy 16s rather than 2x 8 TB, or was when I did it a 2
weeks ago. The cost of more bays pushed me there more than anything.

~~~
ZoomZoomZoom
Of course. What I meant is I'd like to see an option to weigh in smaller (to
be exact: closer to a particular point of available capacity distribution)
drive size as a positive feature for the resulting chart.

So, in a sense, the same idea, but an opposite of a GP comment.

------
spectramax
It is worth noting the design and density of information presented in this
website - we've forgotten how to present lots of data to users because the
modern trend is to pad everything with whitespace. Dense design, no frills,
just a table - this is what the web needs more of.

~~~
ejjpi
Clear and simple, with filtering and sorting:
[https://pangoly.com/en/chart/ssd](https://pangoly.com/en/chart/ssd) (also
performance included)

------
toast0
Given Amazon's system for packing items, I would not buy hard drives from
them. I don't want my hard drive's retail box bouncing around all over inside
the outer amazon box for however long it takes to get to me. That's a recipe
for issues down the road (or immediately).

That said, this looks like a useful tool. I can accept prices from Amazon and
shop around for someone who knows how to pack.

------
lvs
I wish the entire web looked like this once again. Ah the good ol' days.

Please add Newegg and other non-Amazon vendors. Newegg has an API and
everything. Around 10 - 15 years ago, I used to use a simple site called
pricewatch that wasn't too far off from this.

~~~
xmichael99
Apparently it's against Amazon's API terms to compare with other sites. I
recall years ago the guy who runs the site explained that he is only ok to
compare Amazon with Amazon.

~~~
mcbits
I don't think it's against the rules, but the rules are complex and spread all
over multiple places, and they're like Google in that you have no due process
if someone there decides they don't like what you're doing.

~~~
jjeaff
It is against the rules. If you are an e-commerce company (i.e. a competitor)
or you operate a shopping comparison service, you are not allowed to use the
API at all.

[https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-
policy/en/api](https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/api)

~~~
mcbits
That appears to be specific to their advertising API, not the affiliate
program. The affiliate program policies[0] say:

> if you choose to display prices for any Product on your Site in any
> “comparison” format (including through the use of any price-comparison tool
> or engine) together with prices for the same or similar products offered
> through any web site or other means other than an Amazon Site, you must
> display both the lowest “new” price and, if we provide it to you, the lowest
> “used” price at which the Product is available on the Amazon Site.

... which implies that it's not forbidden, but I can't blame someone for not
wanting to risk it.

[0] [https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies)

~~~
mthoms
That seems to be what PCPartPicker is doing to remain compliant. Example:

[https://pcpartpicker.com/product/MwW9TW/western-digital-
inte...](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/MwW9TW/western-digital-internal-
hard-drive-wd10ezex)

------
theamk
This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known
counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for
important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the
cheapest anyway.

If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store
first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not
just Amazon) second.

~~~
all_blue_chucks
Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete
products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP.
I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.

~~~
ReverseCold
If possible, Micro Center or Frys. Frys is somehow profitable but with
dwindling stock at every California/Nevada location I’ve been to recently
(maybe an indicator of higher prices?), but Micro Center is great.

~~~
smogcutter
There was a big thread about Fry’s a few weeks ago. Apparently the story
behind the empty shelves is they’re having contract issues with suppliers.

~~~
natch
That's the line they're giving out, anyway. I'm curious to see if it's just a
ruse to keep some employees around and keep customers coming in paying full
price as they clear the shelves before something else like complete shutdown.

~~~
Macha
It's weird, the shelves are as empty as you could hope for in a liquidation
scenario and there's just crap left. Continuing to pay rent to try get rid of
a few hard to sell pieces of old tech or low value items like phone cases is
definitely past the point of being sensible.

So I think someone in management genuinely believes suppliers will come around
to supplying them goods with payment on sale, despite all evidence to the
contrary

~~~
natch
I suspect they actually own some of their buildings and have for some time,
starting from way back when property values and mortgages were lower. Or at
least "own" in the usual sense of being the owner of the mortgage. Which would
maybe? give them a few months more comfort zone in that they aren't paying
that extra margin of current market rents to a landlord, at least in those
cases where they own.

------
fireattack
The list is not comprehensive.

For example, this one is missing:

WD 6TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive 6TB
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV)

(I bought it just 1 month ago so it's not newly listed.)

------
sleazy_b
This website appears to be messing with my history? After clicking some
filters I can't go back.

------
trynumber9
See also [https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-
drive/](https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/)

------
crummy
Why is that external drives are often cheaper than internal?

~~~
gh123man
I have thought about this as well. I would love someone more knowledgable to
chime in - but if I had to guess it is that consumer hard drive sales have
been declining a lot in recent years. Desktops are a thing of the past for
your average PC user, and as a result hardware/storage upgrades. Laptops,
mobile devices, and cloud storage is where it's at. No one is buying hard
drives anymore except large enterprises. In order to appeal to the consumer
market HDD manufacturers need a value prop to compete with cloud storage. So
discounting bulk storage is the play. I am guessing that they are selling
"white label" enclosed drives at a lower margin than the enterprise
counterparts but still netting more in the long run.

~~~
jjeaff
When I shuck drives like these, I frequently find the higher quality models of
drives in there. However, I have heard that they bin their drives and the
drives that don't pass muster for enterprise end up getting used in these
external drives.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning)

------
natch
This should account for shipping prices, because sellers use them to game the
system.

------
gnicholas
I see a lot of folks talking about the risk of Amazon commingling and used
drives. I buy drives off Amazon, but only external/new. I only uses these
drives as backups, and everything is stored on multiple drives (not RAID,
they're stored in different places for fire/theft security). I've been doing
this for the last 20 years and have rarely had any drive errors (usually it's
a partition that goes, but after reformatting it's fine). What I've found is
that I outgrow the drive before it dies on me. Once I outgrow a drive, I just
buy another that is twice the size and copy everything over from the old
drive, which I hang onto but never use.

But I wonder, am I doing something wrong here? Or are other people just using
drives in different ways (for active files or huge media libraries that they
don't want to store redundantly)? I would understand that under those
circumstances, failure of a single drive is more catastrophic. I don't mean to
be critical here, as I'm far from an expert!

------
dzhiurgis
Missing External SSD option (also while at it, would need to add speed as it's
quite important factor).

~~~
Const-me
IMO it's better to make that yourself.

When you let the companies pick which model of disk to embed in their product,
they pick the cheapest one available. Probably not what you want.

Personally, I have Zalman ZM-VE300, also no-name m.2 2280 USB 3 enclosures,
both work fine. If you'll do the same, don't forget there're 2 sorts of m.2
disks, SATA and NVME, USB enclosures for them aren't compatible.

~~~
wtallis
DIY portable SSDs are great, unless you want something ruggedized/splashproof.

------
mgr86
This guy posted in a thread here a few months ago about side hustles. I was
tempted to start my own off of this model. It appears it’s not as easy to get
started, and with a new baby I’ve been too distracted. But at the same time
with a new baby it’s more tempting for the extra cash.

~~~
ajphdiv
When my son was small I would put him to bed every night with a book and then
sit there in the dark and wait for him to fall asleep. I had a big pillow
thing that I would sit on next to the crib (it was big enough that it had back
support). Well, that hour of sitting there with my laptop was always one of my
most productive hours of the day. Sometimes I would just sit there even after
he fell asleep and continue to work.

------
Thorrez
Although different in 2 ways, this reminds me of this table of RAM prices
1957-2019:

[https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm](https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm)

------
LeoPanthera
See also: "Price per TB" \-
[http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/](http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/)

~~~
whatusername
Also because I was curious -- looks like LTO-8 is about $12.75 on newegg.
Which is still keeping below disk - but only just (and ignores the cost of
drives)

~~~
Dylan16807
It's a pain to format LTO-7 for higher capacity in LTO-8 drives, but once you
do it's only $5-$5.50 a TB

~~~
nullc
Your comment inspired me to do some math:

I have an old 24 tape robot I haven't used in a while. Priced out a used LTO8
drive and 24 LTO7 tapes, and assuming that they're formatted M8 to 9TB, it
still costs out to $0.02/GB-- so only just breaking even with the 12TB USB3
external drives.

You need a lot of tapes before LTO starts comparing favorably to current drive
prices even using LTO7 tapes. :( like 1PB before it's really attractive.

------
synack
Hi, this is my site. Thank you for all of the feedback! I can address a few of
the issues you've raised...

Missing some products. This is a known bug in how I'm currently importing
product data from Amazon's API. Some products are listed with variations that
appear on the same product page but are completely separate products in
Amazon's catalog. There's no way to get the API to return all of the
variations at once, so I have to perform several subrequests to enumerate
those. Currently, that doesn't happen. However, I'm in the process of
reworking a lot of the data import code to use the new PA-API 5.0 and am
planning to make variations work properly with those changes.

Filter by products sold by Amazon. Initially, diskprices.com was set to filter
out products not sold by Amazon, but I received quite a bit of feedback asking
me to remove that filter as some of the best deals are from resellers. The new
PA-API does have a populated Merchant field for most products, so I may try to
expose that.

Display prices including shipping costs. This is addressed in the FAQ
([https://diskprices.com/faq.html](https://diskprices.com/faq.html)), but it
really comes down to privacy. I'd need you to login with your Amazon account
or give me your location in order to compute tax and shipping information and
I really don't want the burden of handling PII.

Clicking the Back button does weird things. This is a bug. Whenever you change
a filter, a bit of JavaScript updates the URL in your address bar so that you
can copy/paste a link to the page you're looking at with the current filters
and send it to someone. It appears I'm not capturing the Back event and
updating the filters to match the address bar. I'll get this fixed soon.

External SSD category is missing. Up until the last few months, there really
weren't many external SSDs for sale on Amazon, but it looks like this is
definitely becoming it's own product category, so I'll add it.

Add Amazon.co.jp. Funny story, diskprices.com had support for Amazon Japan
when I first launched it, but they suspended my account and sent an email
telling me why, written in japanese. Google Translate couldn't make any sense
of the email and I'd had some significant data quality issues with the
filters, so I decided not to pursue it further. This is the first time
somebody's asked for Amazon.co.jp support. I'll look into setting it up again,
but Amazon's added some new restrictions on API access across all regions
since then, so it's a bit more difficult to get new regions added now.

Account for per-port cost in calculating prices. This is something I've been
thinking about for a while. I think this feature ends up looking a lot like
pcpartpicker, with a constraint solver bolted on the side... Given a set of
parameters for total capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, etc, optimize for the
best price/performance. I currently don't have enough metadata about most of
the drives to implement this properly and it's a big feature to develop, but
it's something I want to experiment with eventually.

Again, thank you all for the feedback!

edit: formatting

------
Havoc
More interested in the tech behind the website. Amazon traditionally blocks
scrapping quite aggressively

~~~
winrid
Well, it's not a lot of links. Few hundred maybe. I bet that's not enough for
them to start to notice. Hard to parse the page still, maybe.

~~~
Havoc
>I bet that's not enough for them to start to notice.

I got blocked on very first attempt to scrap from cloud. Literally request #1.

...with code that worked fine on residential IP five mins earlier (where I
coded it).

I'm sure it can be circumvented, but that experience led me to believe it's
better to just save the time and pay for a res proxy (as sketchy as that
concept is)

~~~
winrid
Wow that's impressive. One solution is to just have some random subset of your
users do your scraping for you... Then send the data to the server.

Insecure, but probably good enough for a page like this.

------
unlimit
How are they getting the data? Is there a API or its plain old scraping?

------
sylv3r
This works great, just need to filter the outliers ie:
[https://imgur.com/XHPtfqa](https://imgur.com/XHPtfqa)

------
Dolores12
I believe its against TOS to provide price on your website for specific
product. It could lead to amazon affiliate account ban.

------
SlowRobotAhead
I just spent a few days looking for server hard drives.

IOPs, NVMe doesn’t RAID, throughput, latency, raid controllers, on hard drive
DRAM cache, SAS vs SATA vs M2 vs PCI, drive writes per day, mean time between
failure, specific server firmware on drive...

I’d buy anything off this list for me personally, but I’m definitely in
research mode and there just isn’t enough info here. Buy on price alone!?
Savages!

------
thierryzoller
I think you'd do a lot of money with referal links. I'd be a regular user.
Please extend.

------
mrtnmcc
The price sorting doesn't taken into account shipping (some items aren't
Amazon Prime).

------
adriansky
It would be nice to have sorting!

------
mdip
This is the second "Find _X_ on Amazon more easily" sites that I've come
across in the last week or so (the last was a USB hub filtering site).
Including eBay in the mix, it's the third such site[0].

I _love_ these sites. It's just sad that it's difficult-to-near-impossible to
actually use Amazon (or eBay) for the exact same purpose. The perfect example
hit me, yesterday. I wanted a new A/C adapter for my Thinkpad. It's a USB-C
laptop, so simple, right? Start with a search. OK, there's a lot of A/C
adapters, and a lot of USB-C adapters for phones. In the mix is one or two
(over-priced, non-OEM) adapters.

Let's try the A/C adapters category, maybe I can click into that and filter
based on the metadata? First, find the category. A few minutes later, settle
on something somewhat close. This shouldn't be too difficult; this thing can
be powered by anything 60W or higher that supports USB-PD and has a USB-C end
on it. Nope. Not a single filter and a few thousand results are returned[1].

Product properties/metadata are _so important_ \-- why are so many important
bits of data completely missing/unavailable to me while trying to _find what I
need_? I feel like Amazon and eBay have managed to recreate the experience of
shopping at a Walmart Super Center online -- a store full of products,
organized by some magician, in order to make a 2 minute purchase require 20
minutes of browsing. I guess I don't have to roll the dice picking a check-out
line that might move quickly, but outside of that, the experience is so bad
that I have a solid four or five things I need to buy which I've attempted to
find and simply given up.

And it used to be that you could find other shops online that were more narrow
in their product categories (but not selection in said categories) and offered
better options for filtering and finding the precise item you were looking
for. Many of those are gone, now. The ones that remain all use a handful of
off-the-shelf cart software and are often _worse_ for finding products[2] or
the price is so much worse that you end up finding the product and searching
for its specific part number on Amazon.

I have to say, though, I clicked this link because I have been putting off
purchasing an NVMe SSD drive. So _thank you_ to whomever is responsible for
this site; that was very helpful in getting me to pull the trigger.

In a more perfect world, a site designed to make it possible to filter
available products by a set of incredibly important, common properties which
is _directly tied_ to the site who's job it is to _sell you the actual
products_ wouldn't even _exist_. In this world, it gets over 250 upvotes and
has more than 160 comments after being on HN for about 13 hours.

[0] [https://labgopher.com](https://labgopher.com)

[1] Unless, of course, I decide to sort by anything other than "Featured"
whatever-the-heck-that-means, then there's 150 or so.

[2] NewEgg does a _better_ job than Amazon, but too often a filter will
eliminate a set of products because they refer to a common property of a
product by a different name; I can tolerate that, but it'd be nice if I didn't
have to so frequently.

------
krychu
Such a great site! Love the simple design and lack of ornamentation.

------
dudeinjapan
Please add Japan (amazon.co.jp) m(-_-)m

------
reiichiroh
Does this site work for amazon Canada?

------
JohnJamesRambo
Data is beautiful.

------
justaguyhere
Isn't it against amazon terms to show prices?

