Coworker purchased 16TB external drive for $99 on Amazon – guess what happened
If you’re reading this in 2025, I fully expect the headline will be a headscratcher, but at the moment $99 is less than half the price you should expect to pay for 16TB of storage.
Of course the unit my coworker purchased showed and when attempting to format / verify it failed. But thought I’d show how such a garbage product is being pushed, and why it had good ratings.
I went to Amazon and searched “16TB external hard drive” – I was given a couple of options that were promoted. I chose the $99 one as that’s the price he paid. I don’t think this is actually the brand he purchased, but this product appears to have the same basic setup / look / and what appears to be a scam running to get the stars. That’s all I’m saying about WIOTA is that the product reviews and the product are two different things.
Oh wow, 4 stars… must be good right?
Except you look at the reviews and all the reviews are for a different product:
What they have done is to take an old well-reviewed product, change the product description from a wine glass to a 16TB drive, and are selling something entirely different.
I’ve got advertisement after advertisement for fake products half the price they should be. Well, not all are swapping the product name… some just have zero reviews.
Interestingly in the screenshot above you see there’s a $109 drive with 4.1 stars. Clicking on that takes you to this page, and there are currently no reviews.
Fun times – scammers gonna scam…
Now maybe I’m off a bit on this and 16TB can be purchased for that price. But yeah, no reviews and reviews of other products seem to be the prevailing things I’m finding with known brands being about $11 per TB for the bottom rung performance spinners.
