Confused two things there, sorry. Yes, I don't shop Ali at all, and I'm honestly trying to avoid Amazon or any other place that has third-party sellers (Newegg is another one that's really bad). We had a situation where Amazon co-mingled first party and third party stock, and we ended up with several counterfeit drives (they were QA rejects that had been marked as destroyed) and it was a massive pain to get Amazon to fix it - so even 'shipped and sold by amazon' isn't reliable anymore. My go-to store for tech is Microcenter these days (no third party vendors on there), with Best Buy a second choice. I miss Fry's
.
But even on Microcenter, there's a bunch of no-name offshore stuff that I just don't touch, especially if I see evidence of astroturfing the reviews. I've found that after I go through 2-3 cheap things, I end up spending the premium amount anyway, so most often just start there now.
I don't trust WD hard drives either after their SMR/CMR bait and switch. That whole company seems to have an ethics problem. Hitachi or Seagate for HD, and Inland (my budget brand), Crucial, or Samsung for SSDs these days.
For the enclosures, I'd try OWC but they're backordered until June. Tom's Hardware did a solid review of the Zikedrive enclosure, so I'm rolling the dice on it. That's where I look for SSD reviews, because sustained write performance counts for a lot of what I do - and the manufacturers do their very best to hide that figure, while Toms exposes it in their benchmarks.
Aside, and back to the original root cause here, someone needs to take the USB coalition out to the woodshed over their horrible naming scheme. Hopefully they've learned their lesson with USB 4, because 3 was a total mess.
But then again, anyone that ever thought the USB-B connector was a good idea, needs a smack upside the head.
