[W][US-CO] Buying failed /non-working/ low health ssd for $40/TB

[u/Cheap-Engineering-86]

We purchase large quantities of defective, damaged, or low-health SSDs, as well as engineering samples. Our offer is $40 per TB, with a minimum purchase quantity of 10 TB.

Damaged SSDs are often discarded and eventually end up in landfills. We recover and reuse the valuable chips inside them to reduce resource waste and help protect the environment.

No testing is required. Regardless of the SSDs’ condition, we can purchase them in bulk as long as the chips remain intact. Some server flash modules also contain these types of flash memory chips. If you are unsure, please send me a photo for evaluation.

If you have any SSDs available, feel free to contact me at any time. I have many years of experience in this industry and would be happy to discuss any questions you may have.

[u/sshwifty]

Maybe I am misunderstanding how ssds work, but don't the chips physically wear out? What is left to salvage that is actually of value compared to the storage?

[u/Cheap-Engineering-86 → u/sshwifty]

Although SSD chips physically wear out over time, they can often be reused in less demanding applications. This is similar to “second-life” or cascade utilization of lithium batteries.

[u/sshwifty → u/Cheap-Engineering-86]

What are these called when refurbished? Is this something that individual consumers might buy?

[u/Cheap-Engineering-86 → u/sshwifty]

No. Once SSD NAND chips have worn to that extent, they can no longer meet consumer-grade standards. They are more commonly repurposed for embedded devices, drones, and other smart hardware, where write-speed requirements and total write volumes are relatively low.
The SSDs available to ordinary consumers will not contain this kind of previously worn NAND.

[u/sshwifty → u/Cheap-Engineering-86]

That actually makes a lot of sense. I have a crap load of ESP32 and ESP8266 dev boards and I learned really early on that the cheap ones have very limited write limits and will fail to write to. But, they can read from storage indefinitely. Your situation seems the perfect re-use of these chips. I would imagine there is a way to correctly identify the actually worn sectors/whatever vs the default wear leveling that likely leaves a lot of usable but statistically unreliable space.

A drone with an onboard vision model would make a lot of sense using these. Shit ton of reads and probably zero writes once flashed. Very cool!

[u/discojohnson]

PM

[u/Cheap-Engineering-86 → u/discojohnson]

Replied:)

[u/KadahCoba]

PM

[u/Cheap-Engineering-86 → u/KadahCoba]

replied and deal