Yeah but it's TrashEgg. The retailer that didn't think twice about divulging customer purchase data to state tax authorities. And the best part: they didn't even have to. They did it, and didn't notify customers either. And that's to say nothing of the tons of complaints about their poor handling of returns over the years. Including most recently the scandal involving them refusing returns on faulty motherboards they sold. What a great retailer. Haven't bought from them in years, and will never again.

it's also sold by a third party, and the seller seems quite new. it seems like newegg will fulfill rmas, but still buy at your own risk.

for example, their return policy is:
Customer is responsible for return shipping expenses and restocking fee unless otherwise explicitly states on the product.

on the product, it says:
Return Policies
Return for refund within: 30 days
This item is covered by BTC and PC home Return Policy. <- this directs you back to their return policy page from which i quoted above

so neither page explicitly says free returns. obviously if things work as intended and you don't plan on returning it, new sellers like these pose no problem. but when things go wrong, that's where you really see the difference between places like amazon and smaller third party sellers.

i'd personally pay the extra $12 for the added peace of mind, but to each their own.

OTOH its MUCH cheaper now. You can go spend 2x for drives w/ more RAM and greater endurance and well that doesn't really matter too much for SATA drives. Heck you can buy 2 for the price of 1 high spec and mirror them.

Also they don't magically blow up when the TBW is exceeded. I have a number of SSD that are years old (granted they were better made and not QLC junk) that have all exceeded TBW and not a single once has gave up the ghost yet. That is why backups are important. Any drive will die eventually.

You also have to take into account we are hovering at $50 a TB which is down 70-80% in the last few years so maybe in 5-7 years when this one dies its $10 a TB.

You make a great point SSD vendors have been pulling bait and switch w/ controllers/RAM/dramless/TLC/QLC now for a few years and keeping the same SKU. That should be a criminal act but it seems the US consumer protections are bought and paid for. But the computer industry has alway been rife w/ lies. Monitor sizes, terabyte is not a terabyte, this CPU chipset will last, not divulging SMR, etc.... Thankfully there are YT and the like channels calling them out for their deceptions, and this leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.