Gaming PC

Don’t Buy Scammy $100 16TB SSDs on Amazon

There are prices that seem “too expensive to be true” and there are very good prices that must be fake. A portable external 16 TB SSD under $120 is definitely the latter.

Before getting optimistic about the storage deal, ReviewGeek bought one of these drives and published a teardownIn this teardown, we found that what was claimed to be a “16TB USB 3.1 M.2 SSD” was actually a 64GB USB 2.0 micro SD card mounted on a circuit board that acted as a USB adapter. . A fake, so to speak. (It didn’t seem to contain any malware, though, so it’s…something.) I’ve seen good 64GB cards. As low as $11 at Amazon (opens in new tab).

If you’re expecting Amazon to win this one, it’s not. Type “16TB SSD” into Amazon today and you’ll get at least 15 listings of portable external 16TB SSDs priced from $63 to $120. To put this incredible pricing into context, a $120 16 TB SSD equates to about three-quarters of a cent ($0.0075) per GB. A month ago, his BackBlaze, a cloud storage provider, HDD storage will drop to 1 cent ($0.01) per GB by 2025. yes, hard drive depository — So a 16 TB HDD in 2025 will cost about $40 more than these supposed 16 TB SSDs in 2023.

(Image credit: Amazon)

Here’s the thing: Minus the insane pricing, these 16 TB SSD listings don’t necessarily look fake at first glance. Indeed, they all feature the same picture of the ultra-common aluminum casing and are all sold by companies whose names seem to be taken from random CAPTCHAs.

But it doesn’t always look like a scam. Some things look real if you’re not careful. For one, they are most often listed as “shipped from” by Amazon.The label should inspire security for buyers, as it means the product ships directly from Amazon’s warehouse. have a productUnfortunately, that’s all it means. Amazon may technically own this product, but clearly is not (or is not) responsible for what it is.

List of Amazon SSDs

(Image credit: Amazon)

Another thing that makes these listings look more legitimate is their ratings. Most listings have decent star ratings with double digit reviews. Something with a low star rating but hundreds of reviews doesn’t look like an outright scam, but rather a cheap and shoddy product (which many people are happy to accept).

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