Yet another battery scam! (PWJ133)

It is quite common that cache batteries for RAID controllers are more expensive than necessary. This is an extraordinary example of profit maximising at the expense of the customer. With a sales price of 500 to 800 Dollars and a manufacturing price of ... hmmm... 10$??, this one is really standing out!
Nexsan E18 is the name of the system.

[Matt_The_Hugenot]

Incredible what these companies get away with.

[gabest]

I just replaced the dead 6 nimh cells in a handheld vacuum with two 18650s and a similar charging circuit. Spared no expense, ordered the good quality ones, cost me 5 dollars.

[CEzikMaj]

It's horrific how much you could pay for missing knowledge.

[Thrustmaster]

For my own sanity, I refuse to believe it's that expensive.

[HuntersMoon]

Holy shit! I thought it was going to be around $200 not 500-800, that's just an insane rip-off!!!

[AmitChaudhry]

Chris may be we should start a business about making replacement battery pack for servers 🤣🤣🤣

[wdavem]

For $800 I want to see an iso sticker on every chip, every lead and solder connection, every layer the battery is made of and every sticker!

[CATA]

If 800USD is the battery, what's the price of the system?

[TheMrMarkW]

With proprietary hardware, the manufacturers are terrible for ripping off businesses like this. I used to have some Nokia Firewalls (IP350) which when you opened them up were effectively Intel Motherboards. In most cases the biggest limitation apart from CPU on them was the amount of RAM. However, much like Cisco, they didn't use specially keyed ram, but standard RAM that had a unique speed only to that range of machines - only done so you couldn't just buy Off the shelf RAM.
So if I look at an equivalent 4Gb RAM stick for a PC it would cost £40 direct from Micron. The same Micron RAM but tweaked to only work in the Nokia firewall was well over £1000. When the RAM came it was *identical* to the RAM for a regular PC, including being made by Micron probably in the same factory.

[thpeti]

Microchip has special DRM chips designed specially for battery packs and printer cartridges, preventing the usage of aftermarket third party consumables. Lenovo is using a proprietary Texas BMS chip having a public/private key validation, communicating on the smbus (i2c-like) interface, to prevent aftermarket batteries. "for the customer's safety" (pulling out money from their wallets). These BMS chips can only re-enabled by an authentication process, with a private key stored on a secure server. (like modern e-banking products...)

[gvii]

I've see some rip off parts before, but oof. I'm sure it isn't the worst, but it's definitely way up there on the list. Even using top of the line cells, you're looking at maybe 30 to 40 dollars US at the absolute most. For 800 bucks you could buy a backup generator to run it, and still have enough left over for a nice dinner. Hahahaha.... Wow. That's impressively insane. But then again, that's how they sell people into the next round of equipment. I can think of a major computer manufacturer(Who shall remain nameless...) who does exactly the same thing.

[aaronsaura]

I have a IBM TotalStorage DS4300 San and the lithium battery is non standard, replacement cost $600.00 its a rip off just to try and keep it up and running. Bought the SAN for $200.00 works great until the battery fails.

[Orbis]

I've heart that those hard drive controller batteries are expensive, but this is a joke. You probably pay for their insurance fee, if one of those batteries fail and cause a data loss. But this does not make me feel that they are very confident with their product quality ;)

[aaronbrandenburg]

Regarding the wire cutters he's using in the start of the video.

Those look very similar to the ones that are available through Harbor Freight here in the United States at least!

I recently got a pair of these best ones yet definitely my favorite pair of wire cutters these are really nice compared to some I've seen for the price I think it was around $8 if I remember correctly good investment for sure!

I'm not an eating that fit my hands that well not to mention the quality and construction right down to the detail of the Springtime washer that keeps tension on the blades to keep everything tight and working really well I think that that piece on the one of the Jaws is intended to catch wire Materials it's cut off so that it does not go flying in the direction for safety but not entirely sure if that's the intended purpose but it seems to work well if it is!

I got them initially since I was working with very fine wire and that's more gauge wire just gets basically mangled when using like a pair of diagonal cutters or needle nose as wire cutters!

Some of the wire cutters just kind of squash it and mess up the insulation morning cutting it!

Not to mention on the Harbor Freight ones at least the black rubber handles are anti-standing conductive AKA be very careful if something might be potentially live but then again always make sure there is no power before trying to cut something that could get nasty!

I've yet to cut through anything live but then again I always make sure there's no power before proceeding!

I do know people that have actually wound up cutting a lot of cable by accident or drooling through something live that they were not aware was even there.

Occasionally I have run into somewhere that something was live that should not be!

One time somebody was saying never getting Zapped off a window frame!

And also a door in the same place two separate locations of the structure unrelated.

However one of them was only when the outdoor light was on and the other one was could be anytime.

What happened is they had either screwed or nailed through an electrical cable somehow.

And happened to hit the hot wire with the fastener.

Heard about this more than a few times too many to tell you the truth.

I'm not sure if you out there would be aware of this but if you have them no contact tester and yes I know that you shouldn't trust them for safety reasons and so on I always double check with an actual meter to verify if power or not.

If you have one of them with the low voltage setting you can actually sniff out where there is AC power wiring it will pick up on it since we're sensitive in that mode.

Essentially you can go up to wall and find where a cable passes through at least as long as the power is on this has been really useful and I just govern it quite by accident

[ilya_mzp]

Sometimes you can't replace the cells, sadly. I have a lenovo laptop and it had a discharged battery to the point of cutoff. So i charged the cells to normal voltage but the controller board gone into "dead" mode. So that is a permanent cutoff on undervoltage... Asshole design...

[douro]

I would think even the original Samsung cells probably don't cost more than US$10 apiece.

[RizLazey]

How could a battery cost more than my Phone im watching this video right now...
Thats ridiculous

[chrizzly]

ich habe mir für meinen Homeserver einen gebrauchten LSI Megaraid pci-e controller gekauft, dazu eine passende BBU. letztere war nach Jahren natürlich fertig und nichtmehr neu zu kaufen. Die Steuerplatine hatte neben einem Temperatursensur auch noch einen Mikrochip und einen eeprom, in welchem der Batteriezustand, Zyklen, Alter etc. hinterlegt war. ein einfaches tauschen war da ohne dem anpassen der Werte im eeprom nicht möglich. Selbst neu wäre diese Batterie günstiger gewesen und man hat immerhin versucht, diese "tamper-proof" zu gestalten. In diesem Fall scheints ja wirklich nur 2 Lipo-Zellen zu sein, oder hängt die Batterie eventuell an einem Controller, der eine "neue" nicht einfach so akzeptieren würde?
Irgendwo muss der Umsatz der Unternehmen ja herkommen und eine Firma schreibt die investition in Hardware einfach ab...

[bytefree]

They didnt mind to put some coeficient inside the board, spent half dollar more to make the battery unfixable or report 0% jumping to 100%. Tried several times to fix some batt laptops and I havent been lucky. A few times got thing working but the range in hours and progress bar is useless once you lost the configuration that live somewhere in the board. Also, in an IBM laptop battery, discovered a THREE TERMINAL thermal fuse. Guess what the third terminal is about ?. it runs a heating element and allows to blow the fuse on purpose "if the controller decides that" ... yeahhhh .... you gotta love you Lenovo Batteries.

[reox]

Maybe you are buying a lifetime 24/7 on-site service with the battery without knowing :D