Show HN: RAM Prices

241 165 2 years ago

I was inspired by this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 about diskprices.com last month, and decided to go ahead and make a site for RAM. It's my first time building anything like this! Any tips / suggestions / calls for complete overhaul are welcome :)

cranberryturkey2• 2 years ago

i made https://gpuprices.lol

ronyfadel• 2 years ago

It’s not loading for me

hyperific2• 2 years ago

You have to go to the prices link at the top. Threw me off too.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

I guess you went the route of creating blog posts to play nice with the amazon affiliates program? I'm curious if that's working for you. Have been wondering if I need to do something similar. What's your experience been like so far?

cranberryturkey2• 2 years ago

naah, this ai blog garbage doesn't rank

mg• 2 years ago

It looks like making things easier to search through is a typical Hacker News project.

I had a similar idea some years ago for flashdrives:

https://www.productchart.com/flashdrives/

Except I decided to implement a two-way sort, so the result is a chart, with axis "price" and "size". Or whichever parameter you chose. (At least on Desktop. On mobile, I show a list.)

Then I added ssd drives:

https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/

And more product types like monitors, phones etc, which you can access from the menu.

Maybe we should make a group to discuss the way forward and how to make the whole world easier to search through.

ojbyrne• 2 years ago

Feature request: either an “uncheck all” or a “Select only” to select only one option in a list. Otherwise it’s a lot of clicking to find the 1 specific type of RAM you might be looking for.

calrain• 2 years ago

how about 'right click' on a checkbox removes all other selections in that options section

jeffhuys• 2 years ago

Hiding stuff like that is never good. Not for discoverability, not for mobile.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Good point. I’ll add that in next iteration. Was conflicted if it was a button worth including.

nubinetwork• 2 years ago

If you think that is bad, mouser quoted me over $300 for a 28c256... sure, they're new old stock, but who do they think are going to buy them at that price?

hi_hi4• 2 years ago

There's a whole host of these, which is great, thats been listed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314

This one's mine https://listofdisks.com/ :-)

The faceted search approach can be applied to so many things, and it's pretty easy to code up.

woutr_be• 2 years ago

I’m sure these are trade secrets, but how do these sites get all the data? Is it just scraping?

taspeotis• 2 years ago

https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overvie...

hi_hi4• 2 years ago

No trade secret here, it is indeed simple web scraping.

Although as noted, Amazon does provide a product API, if you qualify with 3 sales, which I did, and was then promptly ejected from the affiliates program by Amazon. I'm honestly not sure I'd want to build my product on top of their API as they then have you by the short and curlies.

I'd be interested to see how all these other "copy cat" sites fare with the Amazon policies?

steelbrain2• 2 years ago

Thanks for building this. As someone who got bit by this, could you please add a column for SMR vs CMR? Thanks again!

hi_hi4• 2 years ago

I had to check what that was. I'd love to add it, along with any other useful metrics that people would find useful, but I'd be surprised if that detail was available in the provided Amazon info (web page).

lofties• 2 years ago

Add sorting on the columns. First thing I tried was seeing which one was cheapest per GB.

adrian_b• 2 years ago

This would be very nice, but it is still very incomplete.

The table needs an additional attribute, ECC vs. non-ECC.

Searching the list for a 2 x 48 GB DDR5 SODIMM kit finds none, while an Internet search finds candidates immediately (e.g. Crucial DDR5-5600 @ $298.99).

generalizations22• 2 years ago

There’s still some new product entries being discovered and added…not sure if what you found was on Amazon, but theoretically, eventually, candidates like that will land in the table.

mjevans• 2 years ago

Missing an 'ECC' vs 'Non-ECC' filter... and I honestly would like all the marketing people that feel a need to specify 'Non-ECC' to just be fired for search pollution.

steelbrain2• 2 years ago

Someone correct me if I am wrong but isn't DDR5 ECC by default? I know this from an anecdote that I used to enable XMP all the time in my builds and run RAM stability tests, none ever caught anything but on my DDR5 builds, if I turned on XMP and played a game for an extended period, I'd get a BSOD after 4-5 hours, which I figured is the ECC built into DDR5 flagging something unexpected.

hugryhoop2• 2 years ago

The default DDR5 ECC is not exposed to the outside, not reported to the OS.

You only caught errors on DDR5 because it's stability is very brittle. Market forces push it to the limit - everybody cares about the MT/s and runs XMP unlike previous generations.

PennRobotics2• 2 years ago

There are two ECC types in DDR5: on-die ECC and external.

All have on-die ECC, which always operates. It is relatively rare to have external; something like Kingston Server Premier, and then you would need a motherboard to support it e.g. some of the Asrock ones, or just a server motherboard (MSI D3051, etc.)

AFAIK there's a performance hit using external ECC, as it adds an extra cycle. I think errors get reported to the OS differently. Beyond that, I know nothing.

xgstation• 2 years ago

ddr5 ecc is on-die ecc, that is built in with the ram die, while the regular ecc relies on extra bit width(72 bit instead of 64 bit) going all the way into CPU such that it's detectable also on cpu (hence OS level) side, which also ensures the error during transmission get corrected as well.

HankB99• 2 years ago

DDR5 uses on-die ECC to improve chip yield (AFAIK.) Any errors are not reported to the OS so the BSODs you experience are not resulting from reported ECC errors. They could be the result of uncorrected memory errors that are undetected but cause the OS to crash.

Some DDR4 also uses on-die ECC. The specs for the Raspberry Pi 4B list DDR4 ECC RAM.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Thanks - ECC was rare enough I figured the titles covered it, but it’s already parsed for in the backend so it won’t be that hard to add.

Edit: still tracking down a weird filter bug, but the ECC filter should work now.

sitkack• 2 years ago

ECC was rare enough

No it isn't, this is the bare minimum. You should also filter by rank, timings, voltage, etc.

theflyingelvis• 2 years ago

How do you get the price data?

jasonjmcghee• 2 years ago

Wow we're under $1/GB of RAM (in certain cases).

Hard to comprehend. I remember getting a 1GB hard drive and how crazy that was, and then much later when a mechanical drive was $1/GB.

Seeing RAM hit that is something else!

daemonologist• 2 years ago

Someone tell Nvidia

(I know, I know, this isn't the fancy GDDR or HBM stuff.)

why_only_15• 2 years ago

HBM is often, as I recall, $30/GB for comparison

wraptile3• 2 years ago

Yet Apple dares to ship a laptop with 8gb ram that is not upgradable. RAM is dirt cheap but somehow the market abusers make it look like it's some expensive rare resource.

Even Thinkpads now solder ram to sell you a +16GB upgrade for 100usd (6usd per gb, double the market price).

yellow_lead• 2 years ago

The funniest thing about this is apple's engineer claiming 8gb on apple is equivalent to 16 on other systems.

tomas789• 2 years ago

Apple uses RAM and storage as price discrimination feature. And it also wants entry level machines so they can say “starting from …” It has nothing to do with the price of the memory itself. It is merely a factor that people are willing to pay for.

blackoil• 2 years ago

My dad paid ~$100 for 4 MB of RAM and that was more than his one weeks income.

Tech has gotten really cheap.

richardw• 2 years ago

I remember flying to the UK for a holiday, and all I wanted there was a 512KB upgrade for my Amiga. Not a jersey, not a watch, just a RAM upgrade.

listenallyall4• 2 years ago

Kinda depressing to realize that I'm probably older than your dad because I remember paying about $560 for 16mb RAM in about 1995, and that was to upgrade the 2nd computer I owned. (I also remember about a year earlier, thinking $400 for a new 1.0gb hard drive was a great deal -- forget megabytes, we're in the future now, an entire GIGA-byte baby!!!)

PeterisP2• 2 years ago

It's amazing what performance you can get by simply putting in as much RAM as your data needs - if plugging in a terabyte or two of RAM ensures that all your data is "in cache" on a single system (+ e.g. a mirror for redundancy) instead of having to constantly read from disk or do horizontal scaling, that's a relatively cheap way to get a simple&performant system.

bluedino• 2 years ago

One of the first people I know that "worked in computers" when I was a kid had a really fast 386 running Windows 3.0

I complained about how slow my 1 Meg 386 was and wanted a 486, he said he had 16 megs of ram (kind of insane at the time) and always said "the system will wait on you"

That was somewhat true until you went to load a new file or program that wasn't cached yet, or when a heavy re-draw occurred and a 4mb 486 would dust it. You just didn't page anymore, which happened a lot back then.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

Actually, this is one of the easiest strategies to write slow software, because you're relying too much on the hardware to bail your poor decisions out. When running the software on worse hardware, you will see super linear slowdown.

gregw2• 2 years ago

If it’s easy/cheap to build 1-2 TB RAM systems, why are there so few I can rent from AWS?

I settled for 768GB when I tried a few months ago and it wasn’t cheap. They did have like one HANA class system that was multi-TB at even crazier prices but I was kind of disappointed when I went to do something like you suggest. It was also impossible to get a lot of RAM without overpaying for a lot of cores I didn’t need and couldn’t use.

I don’t disagree with your point about the optimization benefits of just caching data but actually getting a cache optimized system is seemingly another thing entirely. My perception is that it’s been hard to get >768 GB systems for a bunch of years now. But I don’t follow this space closely,

mlrtime2• 2 years ago

I used to work for a guy in the 90s that sold Ram over the phone. He would get clients that needed to buy a bunch and broker deals with manufacturers. This was before internet pricing.

We would have a white board of all the different sticks and prices.

gwern• 2 years ago

Was it these dudes? https://www.thebeliever.net/aristocrat-inc/ There were a lot of armed-robberies involving RAM and chip deals done over the phone back in the 90s.

hyperific2• 2 years ago

So now we have:

- diskprices.com

- cpuscout.com

- ramstickprices.com

- gpuprices.lol/prices

Now we just need MOBO, power supply, fans and case price trackers!

*Edit: goryramsy's list below is more complete than this one. Thanks!

goryramsy• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314

nolongerthere• 2 years ago

What’s the benefit of these sites over pcpartpicker.com?

parameters69• 2 years ago

Nothing as far as I can tell..

snvzz• 2 years ago

Now we just need MOBO, power supply, fans and case price trackers!

Recreating pcpartpicker[0] one piece at a time.

0. https://pcpartpicker.com/

listenallyall4• 2 years ago

Back in the day, a wonderful solution to your dilemma existed. It was cheap, it was up-to-date, it covered virtually every vendor and every product in existence, the only downside was it was heavier than a phone book: Computer Shopper magazine

KyleSanderson• 2 years ago

RDIMM please (filtering specifically for ECC versus not). Voltage would also be appreciated.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Voltage is on the todo list! RDIMM should be on there now.

fossdd• 2 years ago

For Germany (and i guess Europe) there always is: https://geizhals.de/

universa1• 2 years ago

yes, i am always suprised that such a tool does not exist everywhere (at least the modern western world...). not every shop is in there and rarely I buy from elsewhere... but even just checking specs of any kind of "hardware" (geizhals has also home appliances, ...), or seeing what is available with certain specs, geizhals is a godsend.

and it mostly still has that "old-web"-style :-)

taskforcegemini• 2 years ago

originally geizhals.at, geizhals.eu for a wider market. skinflint.co.uk and cenowarka.pl exist as well

orlp• 2 years ago

In the Netherlands we typically use https://tweakers.net/.

skywal_l• 2 years ago

In a spirit of cooperation, you could add a link to other similar websites for other types of equipments (https://diskprices.com/, https://gpuprices.us/, etc).

Ilasky2• 2 years ago

Just spun up gpupricecompare[0] for GPU prices from eBay as well.

Still need to add more filters, of course, but figured I’d throw it out there as well while it’s in progress and topical for the discussion.

[0] https://gpupricecompare.com

bufferoverflow2• 2 years ago

This one is close to useless, no filtering.

bArray• 2 years ago

The price of 2.5" drives is not good in the UK currently: https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacit...

I needed to buy a significant amount of 2TB(+) 2.5" drives (for a personal server project) and managed to (just about) get them under £15 a TB.

Note to self, next time get a server that accepts 3.5" drives: https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacit...

generalizations22• 2 years ago

That’s a good idea. I didn’t even know gpuprices.com existed! But yeah, I tried to give diskprices a lot of credit here.

Edit: there's a new entry in the sidebar.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Update: added another block after the diskprices credit with all the other similiar sites I could track down, in order that I tracked them down. Did I miss any?

bufferoverflow2• 2 years ago

Tried gpuprices, it's not good. if you search for 24GB RAM minimum, it doesn't return a single 3090.

jldugger• 2 years ago

Wonder if you can rescue this data from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114232515/https://jcmit.com...

update: guess i just need to update my bookmark, it moved to https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

sho• 2 years ago

Adding to the list of feature suggestions, it would be nice for a manufacturer tier filter. I'm not interested in "A-Tech" RAM, which, rumour has it, is sourced from Kingston's chip binning rejects. So of course it's going to be cheaper, that doesn't mean you want it.

It would be nice to be able to filter by only the proper trusted brands and first-party manufacturers.

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

Also hdd-prices.com

cies• 2 years ago

I'd expect a "Show HN" post to at least explain a bit how they built it (or even better link to some browsable source repo if it's open source).

Apart from the nit-pick: nice work! I had a look at the source, proper minimalism right there (and a stray html tag), just loads the page containing all data/JS/CSS and a favicon.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

I mean, that's fair. A decent chunk of the backend effort was figuring out how to scrape amazon without setting off their bot detection; I'd rather not tell them how I did that. The rest is an unholy collection of bash, python and TCL scripts assembling raw html - not surprised there's a stray html tag. Ha.

I forget who said it first, but the Linux OS really is the ideal environment for async operations. I just have some shell scripts running in their own while loops, downloading, parsing, building and uploading.

Thanks! :D

TomK32• 2 years ago

Especially for the Speed selection it needs an invert toggle. Why not use numbers to click for the Capacity? Lastly, something like a sane default or a choice of the three most common search queries would make using it much faster.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Good suggestions, thanks! I was on the fence about the capacity filter. Wasn’t sure if discrete numbers would get in the way or be easier to use.

The invert/uncheck all button is definitely on the list. Hadn’t thought of making it an invert button - I’d put off adding it because I didn’t like the idea of check/uncheck all. Thanks.

I don’t track anything on the site (static hosting from my registrar lol) so I can’t track common queries- but sane defaults makes sense. I can at least uncheck the ancient stuff by default.

r1ch• 2 years ago

Does it only show prices for which you have an affiliate link? I noticed the majority of links are to Amazon which generally isn't great for PC hardware (lots of returned products, fakes, etc).

generalizations22• 2 years ago

…yes. This is exclusively scraping Amazon. Keeps it simple. Also it seemed like a lot of the reason why Amazon is suboptimal for PC hardware is because it’s hard to find stuff - so maybe this helps make Amazon a better option.

atmanactive• 2 years ago

Just in case you didn't know, there is https://geizhals.eu which is the same as https://skinflint.co.uk which has very, very detailed filtering and sorting capabilities. Plus an android app (maybe iOS too). My personal go-to app/site when searching for computer hardware. Check it out.

3abiton• 2 years ago

Absolutely this. Information is money!

xela79• 2 years ago

awesome site that geizhals, even if you don't need to buy from there, the amount of filters is just impressive. Take hard drives for example, you can filter on CMR HDDs so you don't get a HDD that is rubbish in your NAS

FinnKuhn• 2 years ago

you can't buy from Geizhals, it just links to a large amount of different European (mostly German) online retailers :D

rozab• 2 years ago

I think geizhals.eu is the first time I've ever seen my Do Not Track header respected, or at least acknowledged. That's nice.

ilikepi• 2 years ago

There were a few high profile sites that honored it early on. Hulu was the example I remember, but I'm having trouble getting the Wayback Machine to load an archived copy of their policy, so this article will have to do:

https://martech.org/hulu-joined-list-major-platforms-ignore-...

NelsonMinar• 2 years ago

This looks great and is new-to-me. Key feature in this context, you can filter memory by CAS timings.

Is there a version for the US market? I couldn't find one. More info on the site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geizhals

riedel• 2 years ago

One more great feature is that you can compare side by side, particularly if you want to understand different ranks etc, and that you can assemble a virtual shopping cart that also gives you the best option when also considering postal fees.

haunter• 2 years ago

Usually I just use PCPartPicker

https://pcpartpicker.com/

eqvinox3• 2 years ago

This seems to be Amazon-only, without stating so anywhere. If this is the case, it really needs to say it, and prominently.

danpalmer3• 2 years ago

The first entry is mis-labelled as 512GB when it's actually an ancient 512MB stick. Only 1 of the top 5 is actually available to buy. I'd recommend cleaning up the data, and filtering by availability as it's very easy to have an amazing product and price that no one can buy, which isn't useful to have in the data.

jagged-chisel• 2 years ago

The Amazon page has it wrong, so OP’s chart is also.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Yeah that's a good catch. That entry probably showed up overnight - I'm still working on the rarer edgecases. I actually assumed everything would be denominated in GB! My bad.

Edit: odd, they all show as available to me (in the US?).

danpalmer3• 2 years ago

Well it's correct once in the title, incorrect another time in the title, and the data may be incorrect. I suspect that was a malicious attempt by the seller to be borderline on correctness, get unsuspecting sales, and then claim correct listing based on the title. Unfortunately on Amazon/AliExpress/etc this is fairly common and something that needs to be accounted for in usage of the data like this.

AndroTux• 2 years ago

Not that anyone would care about DDR1 anymore, but the DDR(1) filter doesn't work.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

I think I messed up the JavaScript filtering code. I have a guess why it doesn’t work, but it’ll have to wait until after work hours.

aqfamnzc• 2 years ago

Thanks for being very clear about the presence of affiliate links.

CyberDildonics• 2 years ago

This seems like a run of the mill affiliate link site with the same interface as a lot of online stores.

amelius• 2 years ago

It's kind of crazy that Google doesn't offer this type of searching capability, considering all their expertise in search and AI.

guenthert• 2 years ago

If you can explain how that would increase their revenue, I'd think Google has a job for ye.

paulnpace• 2 years ago

Is this trend demonstrating how lame interfaces make more money? I'm talking about Amazon, et al, who could just as easily make this site.

carterschonwald• 2 years ago

Super cool! I think there might be some nice tools to make it possible to sort by any given column or give it a spread sheet like experience, which could help exploring it

rmdashrfv• 2 years ago

That's weird. According to these prices, Apple has been overcharging me for RAM?

downrightmike• 2 years ago

And now: Mild shock 'o'

reddit_clone• 2 years ago

Lol.

$400 added for 18 extra GBs of RAM !

2StepsOutOfLine• 2 years ago

Also missing a CAS Latency filter. It's the only reason I find myself going to newegg over Amazon so I can filter by it.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

I looked into adding that (briefly, as a stretch goal) - I may be wrong, but that info doesn’t seem to show up in the product info very often. I could try including it when available, though. I’ll take another crack at it.

leros2• 2 years ago

Did you have a hard time getting into the Amazon affiliate program?

Last time I saw a post like this it seemed the consensus was that a price comparison site didn't have enough content for Amazon to let you use the affiliate program.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Signing up wasn't that hard - they just want minimum sales per 90 days. I still don't have API access though; figured it was worth just trying this and seeing what happened. It's super unclear what leverage Amazon tries to exert; it might be that they just refuse API access? Guess I'll find out when/if I try to withdraw my winnings.

leros2• 2 years ago

Good to know. Thanks for the info. I'm thinking about building my own price comparison site in another niche.

How are you scraping the data right now?

hi_hi4• 2 years ago

Getting in is the easy part :-) This happened to me recently. The crazy thing (to me) is I received the required 3 sales, which I assumed would be the objective validation required.

I'm also interested if anyone managed to talk to reasonable human at Amazon. I was only met with automated emails.

lopkeny12ko2• 2 years ago

A couple observations:

1. All outgoing Amazon links appear to be intentionally augmented with a "?tag" querystring parameter "probablecausality-20". This appears to be an Amazon-specific affiliate link tracker [0], which means the author is indirectly profiting from every purchase originated from this site, which feels scummy or disingenuous at best.

2. If the author is accepting sponsorship/advertisement revenue from brands for promoting their products, this should be extremely clearly disclosed. Notably, many major brands (like G.SKILL) are conspicuously absent from the rankings, despite having some of the most competitive capacity/dollar ratios.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49919290/what-are-all-th...

hajimuz• 2 years ago

why affiliate is disgenuous?

lopkeny12ko2• 2 years ago

1. Publishing a tracker for RAM prices out of passion for open source and/or computer hardware is noble. Exploiting this for personal monetary gain, however, is not.

2. From my read of how the affiliate program works, the author is basically pocketing some change for every sale made from an outbound click from this website. I can see this being valid for content like an in-depth review or benchmark of a particular model. But here, 100s of links are plastered with no context--extracting affiliate revenue from this feels scummy, cheap, and low-effort. Unlike a review, for example, there is no additional value being contributed that one can't already find directly on the product page.

generalizations22• 2 years ago

It is actually marked in a few places - the column title at the top is labeled 'Affiliate Link', and one of the sidebar entries also clearly says it's "Supported and paid for by affiliate links". Also some of the discussion here involves the fact I'm running the site in conjunction with the amazon affiliates program; and that also featured in the discussion I linked to from last month.

Edit: forgot to mention, the FQA also addresses this: https://ramstickprices.com/fqa.html

Gud• 2 years ago

Thanks! I love it.

1letterunixname• 2 years ago

Neat!

I miss pricewatch.com. Also miss tier-1 vendor deets on prices for registered ECC 128/256/512 GiB modules.

johnklos• 2 years ago

This is nice. I like this, and I like how responsive it is.

It does illustrate a common issue with doing anything at all with Amazon: search manipulation. You can't search on Amazon for, say, 32 gigs while specifying either one 32 gig DIMM or two 16 gig (or, I suppose, four 8 gig) DIMMs.

For example, the listing this site offers is, "DDR5 32GB 6000MHz Ram (16GB×2 PC5-48000)", yet it has "32 GB", quantity 1.

Although I just bought memory and won't need more for a while, this site shows that I got an excellent price (two 32 gig DDR5-6000 for $178 USD).

soyelmango• 2 years ago

I was just thinking today, "I wish there was diskprices.com but for RAM". THANK YOU! Please could you add other locations? (In particular amazon.co.uk)

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Glad you like it :D Alternate locations are on the list, though it'll require reworking a decent amount of code - I don't currently track the geographical location and it'll add to the scraping overhead unfortunately - but it'll happen! At the moment, I'm mostly focused on getting Amazon Associates to approve me. Ha.

hakfoo• 2 years ago

What would be neat would be a way to consume a motherboard's validation list and cross-filter with that.

farseer• 2 years ago

Hi great effort. What tech stack did you use to accomplish this?

generalizations22• 2 years ago

Thanks :) Bash scripts, with a bit of python and TCL thrown in for good measure. The webpage is just a big index.html with some inline javascript and css, pasted together with bash. It's amazing what the OG tools can accomplish lol.

cbracketdash• 2 years ago

Is it me or is the website no longer loading?

Show HN: RAM Prices

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