This is indeed a problem and it has happened to me even reviewing items on Vine. I have received items that I didn’t order, sometimes entirely different from what I have picked…
It might be counterfeit. They might also be bulk-buying trays and selling them by piece.
My first advice to anyone buying parts: test the bloody things ASAP.
The sooner you get an RMA or credit card chargeback started the sooner you’re okay.
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Talked to TigerDirect about the pricing issue. Looks like they had a mix-up on their end where they had 7252p listed, and it was actually the 7232p, but they’re not honoring the original purchase.
Honestly, I’m pretty upset. This is even more time I have to waste trying to build a new NAS.
Not blaming anyone here, actually upset with them because I expected this discount to be real.
its kinda a shame the times we live in, one does not simply just “buy” something there’s always something
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Dude, it’s insane. I’ve returned more items this year than I have in my life!
Update on where I’m at:
- Returned the shady LSI card.
- Returning the processor to TigerDirect once they give me the shipping label.
Called PROVANTAGE sales, and they had a single 7252p in stock. Ended up buying from them instead of TigerDirect because they didn’t cheat me out of a product.
Been following this, the story continues lol
Yeah, Provantage, CDW, and IPCStore are all distributors that I would trust a lot more than any of the other more consumer-ish storefronts.
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Oh man, this story goes much deeper than a few counterfeit parts.
All I wanted to do is take my existing NAS from 16GB to 64GB of RAM and upgrade one of the SSD storage arrays on my desktop from 4TB storage to 8TB.
I started this all back in August. It’s December, and I’m just about outta space on my desktop and still have no space left in my existing NAS 
.
What was supposed to be a few-hundred-dollar upgrade turned into: “someone bought me a nice rug, so I upgraded my house to match”.
I was unlucky with one of two 4TB Crucial MX500 drives I bought to go to 8TB on my desktop. It bluescreens Windows if I start copying files to it, and it’s not even the OS drive! I have 10 of the MX500 series and had no issues until now.
Eventually, I bought a Storinator chassis and FINALLY got that thing through customs. While 45Drives is in the US, Protocase (their distributor) is in Canada. It took sending FedEx my social security number to finally get the thing. I did whatever I could to mitigate my identify-theft risk.
I also bought a bunch of WD Red Pro drives but found out they’re only designed to work in 24-drive chassis (my Storinator supports 60 HDDs). WD eventually responded to me. I’m returning those drives today. I bought used HGST enterprise drives as a replacement but have yet to test them as the Storinator arrives today.
These are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I’ve bought and returned trying to upgrade the RAM in my NAS and expand my desktop’s storage 
.
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the lsi boards come with metallic or black pins on the 24i. it just depends what they had in stock at the time.
the cpu, as long as it came in its moulded plastic sleeve, in the brown box then its likely an oem/tray part. and yeah they get sold without being labelled as such.
my only worry is if you have to return them due to faults…
they aint cheap parts and ebay warranties?
LOL!.
i dont think they are real.
as for the rest… man thats a deep puddle you stepped in… 
good luck.
Provantage and CDW regularly sell stuff they don’t have in stock and may never ship it.
This happened to me multiple times from 2020 to now with GPUs and a couple drives.
That might just be the case for me. I see that in PROVANTAGE, it’s marked as “completed”, but there’s still no tracking number, and I haven’t seen it yet in front of the house or in the mailbox.
There’s so much I don’t know about buying server equipment! When I was a kid, I’d go to the store and pick everything up. It seems like such a hassle to buy anything these days.
PROVANTAGE
After some back-and-forth on their end, PROVANTAGE said:
It appears that your item was lost in transit or never left the warehouse. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. In the meantime, I have issued a replacement.
The replacement has yet to ship 
.
Storinator
I got the Storinator chassis and set it up.
45Drives forgot to send the motherboard SSD bay, so the motherboard compartment has 10 SSDs just sitting in there.
I can’t use these in the drive bays because they’re U.2, not SAS.
Sizing
I bought 8 of those Intel Optane 905p drives, but adding them all is a bit of a pain. I only have two NVMe slots and 2 OCuLink ports, so I bought an ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 4.0 card for the other 4.
The card is so long that I had to take out a fan in the back of the Storinator to fit it.
HDDs
Found out 9 of the 66 HDDs were bad.
I’d originally purchased some WD Red Pro drives but found out they’re not designed for more than 24-drive enclosures, so I returned those and instead purchased used HGSTs from eBay.
The listing said:
Date code 2018 100% health, Grade A no errors or growth defects!"
Had to go through and pop out each one until the system would boot then add them back and check again and again and again. 10 hours later, I found 9 problematic drives.
4 of them had obvious physical issues such as scraping, clicking, and vibrating loudly. 5 of them wouldn’t allow TrueNAS to load.
TrueNAS
Found out that booting TrueNAS from an LSI card is finicky. I played around with Option ROM settings and a bunch of other things, but simply couldn’t get it to boot when other HDDs were plugged in.
I ended up connecting my boot SSDs to a Mini SAS HD connector on the motherboard.
With rare parts? Yes.
There are counterfeits and also peopel selling things they don’t have.
Sometimes Provantage for example puts things like this “Completed” but no tracking no nothing. You have to contact them which may never get a response.
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I finally got my 7252p last week. It’s super late, but much earlier than Jan 13th that was on their website.
Those HDDs I bought, I saw some threads of people buying them “new” in 2020 but noticed they had 20K+ hours on them. Mine were properly marked as Used, but I had numerous issues drive 9 drives being bad at the hardware level and the others having write and read errors, so I returned 2/3rd of what I bought (couldn’t return the rest), and switched to 100% SSDs.
The more I’ve changed things, the less issues I’ve had as time goes on.
I had a potentially-counterfeit ASUS Hyper M.2 Gen3 V2. It has some stickers from China and had clearly been opened and put back together. I bought this “new”. Returned that, and got another one. It’s working great!
I bought 3 MikroTik SFP+ adapters that also look counterfeit. Their serial codes start with a different letter, and all of them had connection issues. Swapping to one of my older ones fixed the issue, so I returned those.
This has been one huge journey, but I think I’m nearly done! I don’t know how any consumer acquires legitimate products in any reasonable capacity. I keep finding more weird product issues.
a simple rule here is buy from reputable sellers.
the amount of time you wasted testing and sending stuff back.
you may as well have just shopped on amazon and took the shipping on the chin.
They mix products source streams tho
true but like i said you just buy from reputable sellers.
for instance i want a gpu… i buy it through amazon but from overclockers.co.uk.
the card may not come direct from overclockers it may just come from the amazon warehouse stock.
but i know either way its not being shipped from a known source of counterfeit goods like schenzen markets.
…Uhhh, that’s exactly the problem, Amazon commingles all of their warehouse stock regardless of the origin. So no, if it’s shipped from Amazon then you don’t know where it came from, and it might be from a Shenzhen market.
It’s been a demonstrated and persistent problem that fraudulent sellers are sending items to Amazon which aren’t what they’re advertised to be, and once they’re mixed with the stock there’s no way of identifying them until someone gets one in the mail.
IIRC there was a fiasco with them having a huge shipment of ‘fake’ knockoff DDR4 memory that was repackaged… there’s no way in hell the average worker in receiving at Amazon even knows that “DDR4” means, but it probably looked like what they said it was and so it sold.
no need for the quotes to perform acrobatics to misrepresent what im saying…
your decontextualizing the comment to make it sound like something i wasn’t saying.
please dont because thats still only you saying it, so in reality your just arguing with yourself…
not good…
i clearly said when i shop, i pick reputable sellers even when using amazon.
you shop with nvidia, guess who’s supplying your gpu.
you shop with amd, you aint getting an nvidia gpu by mistake.
you shop with corsair… hey presto your buying from corsair.
you buy from xeng yung pia at unit 12 hi-tech district, schenzen which is cleary marked under seller info. then you take your chances. .
at any time he could have backed out of the sale once he knew the goods were being shipped from china.
he didnt, he took the risk and got burned…
which while shit for him, is great for you.
as you now know now. not to ship direct from china.
i just clicked on the seller… then looked up the name…
its not rocket science to do basic research about who your buying off.
Address: No. 6175, Building A, Pengnian University Town Tech Park, Taoyuan Street, Nanshan District. Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. 518100
as for amazon shipping fake good’s … amazon are the victim of fraud also…
sure it seems to happen regularly… but they are trying to get it undercontrol and you are hearing about the issue in the news. so they aint hiding they have a problem…
so really this was down to user error.
yeah i know thats rough, blaming the victim… but in this case.
the victim is almost entirely to blame…
like a drunk driver, you cant get in the car, pile it, then blame the tree you hit.
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Slight disagree about whom is to blame, I’d say there are aspects at every level of different degrees of blame.
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