Most of the ones I've seen are; even from China. Maybe you are searching in the wrong side of town :-).

I don't bother much with feedbacks, especially on eBay, which I don't use often anymore (a few years now). While not sure, I believe that a seller can just enter a new name in eBay and start again if his feedback goes low. It is not controlled. I prefer to use aliexpress now for little things, since aliexpress uses actual shops (or registered) as sellers from what I heard. Their stuff come usually in original packages contrary to eBay where stuff comes usually without packaging (for reducing post costs from what they say).

When it comes to large computer parts, like motherboard, cpu, gpu, I usually buy from registered .com shops (which is not often), or from local, depending on the price and if I want something quickly. From eBay I search for cheap used parts for experimenting with something.

A well known brand is better for sure. It became a well known brand because it's products were/are good. It is simple to understand that. And they could break or arrive non working. It can happen to anything really.

I couldn't believe some sellers would be this blatantly dishonest. So I went to eBay and looked. If you do a search on eBay for "16Tb external SSD" you will find that China is awash in these things. And they don't stop at 16Tb either. They have a 64Tb model! And it's waterproof!! It only costs $68!!! It has a new feature that I've never seen before: "Mute". I guess that means you can make it even more silent than normal silent.

But you will have to put up with it's read speed of "up to 30MB/s". That's about 1/4 to 1/3 of what a HDD will do. But hey, they managed to design an SSD that writes faster than it reads - you get write speeds of up to 37MB/s. Which is roughly the same speed you can burn a modern DVD.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/13429721303...Bk9SR5Km6vuNYQ

Well, I need 1 for use and 1 for storage - for which it's fine. So worth a try from a seller with close to 100% feedback.

My point was not that a super slow device like that wouldn't be useful in your specific circumstance. My point was that if it's 1/3 the speed of an HDD, then it is NOT an SSD. I couldn't even guess what it might be at that slow of a speed. Labeling it as an SSD, even though they disclose the actual speed further down in the eBay listing, is complete dishonesty. Blatant fraud, more specifically. You bought something that you thought was a speedy data storage device. An SSD. It's not. And you bought it thinking it was 16Tb. It's not. That's not something I'd be OK with, even if it fulfilled my immediate need, as meager as that need would have to be.

It's not your fault that you fell for this scam. Most people wouldn't know that consumer grade external SSD's don't come in sizes anywhere close to what was advertised. And they may not recognize that a claim of "30Mb/s" is a laughable specification for an SSD speed. It is the seller who is preying on customers who may not know many technical details about what they are purchasing, which is most customers.

Sorry that you got taken.

Sure, I agree with everything. I just personally wasn't thinking in this way ― because it was clear to me from before I bought it - that it's not a perfect new SSD, with these prices. I just hoped it would work, and have more than 4TB (whatever it was :-J).

The first red flag
Price is unreasonably low for the advertised product. Designed to suck in the gullible.