Too good to be true?

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At that price, if you get the actual product then it has to be some sort of gray market / "fell off the back of the truck" special. There's no way anyone is legitimately selling them at a profit at that price... or even selling them and breaking even. Not if they're paying wholesale for them.
 
I bit.

Seller has a few feedback from pass sales on these.
 
Darn it, I just bid on a 950 Pro on Ebay a few hours ago and I am still the highest bidder. Here is hoping I get out bid soon so I can jump on this.
 
any chance this wont be covered by samsung for warranty should something happen? dont think the place is an authorized seller or is it?
 
Rav3n said:
Returns... not accepted. Pass.
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- From Personal reasons we do not accept any returns. and if you really want a return , you will have to pay the shipping to our address.
 
A15G said:
- From Personal reasons we do not accept any returns. and if you really want a return , you will have to pay the shipping to our address.
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Not thanks. I've been on ebay 13+ years. Ifor it seems fishy it probably is.

I got one not too long ago brand new for around 260 from Microcenter. If people get these and they aren't fake, they saved a few bucks. If not, I doubt it'd be worth the hassle.
 
Rav3n said:
Not thanks. I've been on ebay 13+ years. Ifor it seems fishy it probably is.

I got one not too long ago brand new for around 260 from Microcenter. If people get these and they aren't fake, they saved a few bucks. If not, I doubt it'd be worth the hassle.
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I've been on Ebay 19+ years and 4600 feedback with over 96% positive does not strike me as "fishy". Then again there is s first time for everything.. I'll report back when it arrives. Auto reply email says before 04/05/16.
 
If you do wind up getting it -- that's a pretty smoking deal. I paid 290 a few months ago and that was smoking hot.

At this price though -- it does have that "fell off the back of a truck" smell to it, *shrugs* I'd take a shot at this if I didn't just spend 500+ on a Dell 144Hz Gsync, I already have one 950 pro 512MB, and it's the fastest thing I've ever seen :) Maybe in 6 months I'll pickup another one when this price is common and I need a bigger C: (imagining two of these in Raid0) mmmm
 
BTW, if someone wants to buy one still, you can probably get down to 260 or so via Jet.com using the SHOP15 promo and waiving returns. Waiving returns at Jet only stops you from returning if you dont want the item. They will still process returns for defective products.
 
Evil Scooter said:
They were $270 at Frys a week ago. I can believe the price.
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Thank you for proving my point. If Frys had these down to $270, that's a pretty good indicator of what the absolute low point price is where a store breaks even or possibly loses a few dollars on the transaction to draw in foot traffic. Corroborating this, the low price point over the last six months at pcpartpicker is $300. That would represent a modest (about 10%) margin assuming a cost around $270.

So seeing this drive for significantly lower, and there's a big difference between $235 and $270 - before factoring in ebay and paypal fees - there's absolutely no way that seller bought these drives at wholesale. They are some kind of reconditioned / refurb drives, or they were lost or stolen and flipped through a third party, or some other similar scenario happened which explains how the seller came by them cheaply enough to resell them for a profit at $235. I wouldn't want any part of this "deal" based on principle alone.
 
It probably is legit, $235 is probably fell off the back of a truck, distributor or razor thin margin territory, but not low enough I'd think its outright fraud. As someone already mentioned, 4K positive ratings isn't what you'd expect from a scam.

That said, I got a 950 pro around New Year's for this much with a few Jet promos, Amex cash back and Android Pay discount, great drive! :)
 
I get the distinct impression that these are starting to be unloaded to make room for the forthcoming 960/961. I picked one up from Newegg for $290 something last week.
 
Out of curiosity, are these drives worth the premium over a standard SSD for anything outside of benchmarks? I feel like my SSDs already load things so quickly that I wouldn't even notice if it was much faster.
 
doublejack said:
Thank you for proving my point. If Frys had these down to $270, that's a pretty good indicator of what the absolute low point price is where a store breaks even or possibly loses a few dollars on the transaction to draw in foot traffic. Corroborating this, the low price point over the last six months at pcpartpicker is $300. That would represent a modest (about 10%) margin assuming a cost around $270.

So seeing this drive for significantly lower, and there's a big difference between $235 and $270 - before factoring in ebay and paypal fees - there's absolutely no way that seller bought these drives at wholesale. They are some kind of reconditioned / refurb drives, or they were lost or stolen and flipped through a third party, or some other similar scenario happened which explains how the seller came by them cheaply enough to resell them for a profit at $235. I wouldn't want any part of this "deal" based on principle alone.
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Well I'm not sure I proved your point. :p As you noted Fry's has overhead an etailer does not incur. Add to that we don't know why they are selling these. They could have ordered them for systems to be sold and the buyer backed out. Could be a simple case of they cannot afford to sit on $1500 worth of SDD and want to recoup the $$ ASAP. Lots of ways I can think of that this could be a legit deal. It's advertised as new in box.. if it arrives some other way I'll let everyone know.
 
bpizzle1 said:
Out of curiosity, are these drives worth the premium over a standard SSD for anything outside of benchmarks? I feel like my SSDs already load things so quickly that I wouldn't even notice if it was much faster.
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They are stupid fast. My striped 850 EVO's read at a bit over 1k in Crystalmark, writes are quite a bit slower. The 950 Pro M2 being sold gets 2500 reads and over 1k writes. Would you notice a difference? Hard to say, not sure if I will either... but I'm game to find out. :p Disk speed has been the biggest system bottleneck as long as I can remember..... the worm is finally turning.
 
Well I just got a slightly used one (with a firmware upgrade) for $265 on eBay having missed out on this. It was about time I retired my 120GB Intel 320 from 2011, considering it was SATA2 and only 120GB (but it did only use 2% wear).
 
Evil Scooter said:
I read about that adapter on Anands some time back. Do you think it's worth $75? The review said in day to day use thermal throttling is a non-issue. Looks neat and all.. but $75 neat??
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Haven't tested in action yet, but it was thrown in on the deal, can't say it didn't help sell me .

This review kinda makes me glad, Angelbird Wings PX1
 
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Evil Scooter said:
FYI, 10 more available at $299... same seller & link.
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Interesting -- at that price though I'd wait for a deal on amazon just to make sure everything was on the up and up. (refurb/etc possibility) I bought mine for 309 I believe a few months ago with Same day delivery :) (and 3% cashback (making total out of pocket cost 299.73
 
Evil Scooter said:
FYI, 10 more available at $299... same seller & link.
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And there go some of the theories about how the seller came to own these. There are even more red flags now. I have no doubt that buyers will receive authentic drives, but the evidence strongly suggests these are ill-gotten wares. The seller knew they were hot but misjudged the demand at $235. So this batch is being sold for a lot more.
 
I bit the bullet even though I have not much hope in it.

About almost 1 week has passed and I never hear anything from the seller nor received a tracking number.

Earlier today I got a package from amazon and when I opened it.

LAYmrFt.jpg
 
Well I ordered the same day so hopefully there is a package for me floating around out there as well ;p
 
Well, for all of you that ordered them, I hope this deal is/was legit....please post back with outcomes.

bpizzle1 said:
Out of curiosity, are these drives worth the premium over a standard SSD for anything outside of benchmarks? I feel like my SSDs already load things so quickly that I wouldn't even notice if it was much faster.
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Well, lets see here:

What sequential read/write speeds are you getting from your current SSD ? 500-550mb/s perhaps ? Thats not bad per se, by YESTERDAYS standards :)

What would you say if you were suddenly able to increase those speeds by 4x-5x on average, to approx. 2000-2500mb/s read & 900-1500 writes?

Well, I too was skeptical, but when I built my new skylake rig in January, I said what the hell, I might as well make it as up to date as possible by going with these m2 NvME drives.... and then the REAL fun began........

W10pro loads in less than 7 seconds, all my apps load practically before I can move my finger from my mouse, and moving/copying/duplicating data of any type/size just happens so fast that I have to look twice to make sure I am not seeing things.... even a complete clone of my boot drive to my "regular" SATA III SSD only takes about 7-8mins, where before it sometimes took almost 40 mins when I was using 2 "regular" SSDs !

Yea I have a fast CPU ([email protected]) & Ram (3400)....but both of those are worthless if you can't keep them fed with data because of a bottleneck like a slow disk drive.

What say you now, hummmm ?
 
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raclimj said:
I bit the bullet even though I have not much hope in it.

About almost 1 week has passed and I never hear anything from the seller nor received a tracking number.

Earlier today I got a package from amazon and when I opened it.

LAYmrFt.jpg
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What's the big deal?

I get stuff from Amazon fulfillment all the time from high volume sellers on ebay.

I don't understand all the concern. If the ebay seller doesn't ship exactly what is advertised, simply open a claim. The only risk the buyer takes in such cases is if the seller runs off with everyones money, but with an active seller with 4.7K/95.7% positive FB, that's not happening. Ebay automatically defaults claims to the buyer within 30 days, for any reason. Buyer returns are all out of the seller's hands. You'll get your full refund + return shipping cost, every time.
 
Mine arrived on my doorstep yesterday, Amazon fulfillment so I seriously doubt these fell off the back of a truck. Started installing last night and my Intel RAID "hiccuped" on reboot causing a verification to start. On 3TB that is an overnight process and you cannot recover from a saved image on that RAID partition until it is complete. Hopefully get it up and running tonight, I'll post up when it's complete.

For those replacing their boot drive and restoring from an image, it's a process. This is how I'm able to get it done. I had to re-size my boot partition using 3rd party software as I was going from a 1TB RAID stripe to this 512gb drive.

1) Grab a copy of the 950 Pro drivers before you start, win7 -x64 does not have one of it's own.
2) Install the new drive.
3) Boot into windows and update the driver for the 950, Reboot.
4) Once back in the OS ensure the new drive is running fine and do a quick format.
5) Backup the boot drive to Image.
6) Reset boot assignments and HD boot order in BIOS, reboot.
7) Restore from image & reboot.
8) Profit. :p
 
doublejack said:
Thank you for proving my point. If Frys had these down to $270, that's a pretty good indicator of what the absolute low point price is where a store breaks even or possibly loses a few dollars on the transaction to draw in foot traffic. Corroborating this, the low price point over the last six months at pcpartpicker is $300. That would represent a modest (about 10%) margin assuming a cost around $270.

So seeing this drive for significantly lower, and there's a big difference between $235 and $270 - before factoring in ebay and paypal fees - there's absolutely no way that seller bought these drives at wholesale. They are some kind of reconditioned / refurb drives, or they were lost or stolen and flipped through a third party, or some other similar scenario happened which explains how the seller came by them cheaply enough to resell them for a profit at $235. I wouldn't want any part of this "deal" based on principle alone.
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You are making a lot of assumptions here. Cost could be $199 on these things for all you know. The margins are razor thin on many products. This I am keenly aware of. That doesn't however change the fact that this isn't true of all hardware. High end video cards usually have a fair amount of margin in them. High end SSDs might as well. Keep in mind that an M.2 drive is probably cheaper to produce than a SATA based SSD. For one thing they don't waste materials on a shell for mounting in a 2.5" bay or bracket.
 
^^^^ Manufacturers put a lot of resources into "packaging". As you say, on the 950 it's a non issue. On a side note, it sure would be nice if they added 2c to their price and included one of the mounting screws in the kit. My MOBO came with one, but that sucker is tiny! I can see how it would be easily lost.
 
Evil Scooter said:
Mine arrived on my doorstep yesterday, Amazon fulfillment so I seriously doubt these fell off the back of a truck. Started installing last night and my Intel RAID "hiccuped" on reboot causing a verification to start. On 3TB that is an overnight process and you cannot recover from a saved image on that RAID partition until it is complete. Hopefully get it up and running tonight, I'll post up when it's complete.

For those replacing their boot drive and restoring from an image, it's a process. This is how I'm able to get it done. I had to re-size my boot partition using 3rd party software as I was going from a 1TB RAID stripe to this 512gb drive.

1) Grab a copy of the 950 Pro drivers before you start, win7 -x64 does not have one of it's own.
2) Install the new drive.
3) Boot into windows and update the driver for the 950, Reboot.
4) Once back in the OS ensure the new drive is running fine and do a quick format.
5) Backup the boot drive to Image.
6) Reset boot assignments and HD boot order in BIOS, reboot.
7) Restore from image & reboot.
8) Profit. :p
Click to expand...

I just used the samsung software - copied my samsung raid drive to my 950 pro.
 
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