Just about everything else they sell is made from bee venom. This drive probably is as well.
Air.
Maybe it was one of these beers:
That’s for sure. Two nights ago I signed into Amazon to reorder my 1 ounce bags of Dot original pretzels and discovered that some 3rd party ne’er do well had somehow taken over all the availability, wanted to sell me just one box of ten at a time, and wanted to charge me $24 shipping for each individual box I might order and have delivered. Boom, just like that! I ended up getting them from Walmart’s in the amount and for the price that I’m used to.
I ran across one of those vendors awhile ago. They disclose $9.99 shipping on $5 to $15 items. Which is already a borderline deceptive practice. I wanted about a dozen various but similar items, expecting the shipping to be $9.99 for the whole. Which items are each light and small, so the total package would’ve been a ~12x18" plastic bag weighing less than 3 lbs and maybe less than 2.
When I hit [checkout] I was shocked to see ~$100 of items and $120 of shipping. Noped right out of that cart.
Temu never pulls that crap. When Temu has better consumer enforcement than Amazon you know they (Big A) have lost their way.
You know what? I’ve used Temu on a couple of occasions and then let them slip out of my mind. Thank you for mentioning it. I’m going to start checking there first for stuff.
When I have seen that, it’s usually a sign the manufacturer is discontinuing that product or that particular packaging of it.
So somebody buys up the last of a drying pipeline & tries to extort folks.
Might be worth checking w Dot directly about their product line.
I’ve just gone through that with Gatorade G-Zero. They started out w 6 or 8 flavors and 3 bottle sizes. They’re down to 2 flavors and are eliminating the various bottle sizes too.
The others are claimed to be available on Amazon for stupid prices. Color me skeptical those vendors have much actual stock left.
I am curious: A very similar drive is on sale from Amazon in the UK for £232 ($311).
WD 10TB Elements External Hard Drive, Desktop HDD storage, USB 3.0 compatible, Fast Transfer rates, Easy add on storage for all your pictures, videos, music and documents, Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories
Which is why they sell for thousands of dollars.
Good chance it’s legitimate. A 10TB drive (also won’t be SSD) will be less expensive than a 16TB drive. That price is in line with what I paid 4 or 5 months ago for a dozen or so I had to order for work.
Of you look at the listing for the 16 Tb drive, you’ll find the same 10 Tb option is also available, at a $400 price point.
So there’s still a pretty big pricing discrepancy.
Spinning hard disk drive (HDD) prices were kind of weird even before the world went nuts. Back in November 2024 I scored an 18 TB Seagate drive for $250, direct from their own online store. It was crazy discounted, to the point I think even the 12 TB model still cost more. The 20 TB model also commanded a big premium. Why was that particular one so heavily discounted? I don’t know, but here’s a price list from June of that year:
4TB: $120
6TB: $110
8TB: $160
10TB: $270
12TB: $300
14TB: $430
16TB: $230
18TB: $250
24TB: $540
So clearly something was up with the 16 TB and 18 TB models whose MSRP was probably in the mid to high $400s.
Today, that same 18 TB drive isn’t in stock at their store (only the 4 TB and 6 TB models are), but the MSRP is $620!!!
Also note that the legitimate drives people are mentioning here are Western Digital, a well-established legitimate company that’s been selling hard drives for decades. The scam one in the OP is some company called either “VLSVLS” or “Tinycarry”, neither of which anyone has heard of.
Although if we’re discussing a drive (SSD or spinning) in an enclosure, the names of the fulfilling website, the seller, the enclosure maker, and the underlying storage drive can legitimately be four different outfits.
I bought a 14TB external hard drive (not SSD) almost identical to the WD 10TB one in the picture above for $C389 about a year ago. Today, thanks to assorted pressures like AI Datacenter construction, they are almost double that.
SSD drives over 2TB (maybe 4TB) are going to be prohibitively expensive and impractical. Note that SSD drives have a “lifetime” use and after to many writes they will fail. Not likely an isue unless you use them a lot for years. (I heard of a store program that “wore out” SSD drives in their tills in a year. Must have been an unreal abount of writes.) As a result, an actual mechanical platter disk is probably best for archival or backup purposes if archival data integrity is an issue.
True, but the OP’s title does say portable hard drive. I actually missed that the offered device was supposed to be an SSD.
For a 16GB external SSD, I’d go for RAID 0 on smaller drives.