Trusting Newegg and Aliexpress is part of the problem.
Also, if the price is too good to be true, it probably is fake. Look up what you want. Sort by review. Look at what the top-reviewed ones cost. Focus on the ones that have very high ratings (like 4.7/5 or better). Amazon will tell you if “customers usually keep this item” or “customers usually return this item”. The lack thereof isn’t a red flag, but a highly rated product that customers usually keep that costs a bit more than other products… there’s probably a reason they’re willing to pay more.
Dang when did Newegg become the problem? I’ve been buying stuff from them for decades.
A decade ago.
A Chinese conglomerate bought a majority stake in 2016. They immediately started going downhill. Then in 2020 they merged with another Chinese company.
Newegg used to be good. I bought a lot from them, too. Even had a shirt. They haven’t been good for a while. I don’t know all the details.
Real ones — computer builders, I mean — would just use PCPartPicker and buy from whoever had the best prices. Even if you didn’t need their tools to tell you what was compatible with what, the site was fun and free and it saved you money. Used to be, Newegg had the best prices, but they started getting undercut by Amazon and others. But there was some other drama with them, too.
They got bought out, and the new owners do less of their own selling and more pass-through for shadier vendors as I understand it.
Several years
But I got such a great deal on this Blur-Ay pure organic asbestos retractable cup-holder, I’d have been a fool not to buy! It did burn my house down though.
Can’t be real asbestos if it burnt your home down. Sorry to say you may have been scammed.
Scoundrels!
Ah, i was looking for sdcards a few days ago and found some SanDian Extreme MicroSD with all positive reviews and way too cheap in a Aliexpress bundle deal.
I’ve bought some of those, knowing they were potentially sketchy, for applications that don’t matter (like NintendoDS flash carts, or Raspberry Pi projects) and I’ve mostly been impressed with them. They have worked, and had most/all of their listed capacity at most of their advertised read/write speed.
Then again, I was only buying low-capacity ones, like 16-32GB max, and haven’t used any for many write cycles, so idk if they hold up.
But it was worth it, for me, to get a steep discount on chips for tinkering projects.
But for my 1TB chip for my Deck, I went through the verification process with the manufacturer to confirm it was a legit chip while it was still in the return window!
The 32 GB ones were like 2.50 $, while the 128 GB 2.25 $ and 256 GB 2.20 $. Pricing like that.
And they might look like they have the capacity, but suddenly, after 8 GB or so, you get data corruption, because there’s no more physical flash and blocks just get overwritten.
Infinite space enabled by their cutting-edge cloud storage technology
when all your data goes up in smoke.
Wouldn’t be an issue if they didn’t discontinue so many and stopped supporting a bunch. If you want a 4k UHD capable drive today it’s hundreds and almost all discontinued
Get a internal laptop player instead. The USB ones are just this and a SATA adaptor in a case anyway. And the ones between 2010 and 2015 are top in speed and capabilities and don’t even need the LibreDrive flash to dump content.
Do people really use disks when playing emulated games?
Some do, because RPCS3 lets you play games directly from an internal bluray drive and also to create ROM dumps (actually BluRay disc images).
Is probably the most “legitimate feeling” giving experience. You can be a legitimate owner of a copy of a game and use a random iso dump of the very same game, but just plug the actual thing gives different strokes.
Never thought about it in these terms, thanks.
I wondered the same but after a bit of thought, it’d actually be really cool to build a tiny PC that ran an emulator Linux distro setup to automatically boot inserted disks.
Like RetroPi with pre-loaded ISOs is cool and all but having a physical library of disks you can just pop in is really fun sounding
