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At this point, I don’t really know what to say. It honestly feels like no matter what you buy, you get more or less the same hardware, and you’re most likely getting a heavily overpriced product just because some company printed their logo on it. [...] However, I can’t help but feel a little bit cheated by companies just buying off-the-shelf products, slightly modifying the case layout, and then quadruple the price because it’s “from a reputable company”.It's worth mentioning that buying the same hardware from a reputable company is not always pointless. At USB 3's data rate, power and signal integrity are a serious concern, stability of the hardware is often sensitive to PCB layout. There are numerous pitfalls to shoot yourself in the foot and they are often not obvious at all. Even with exactly the same chip, or even the same circuit connections, a tiny layout change can be a life-or-death issue.
For example, any change to the data line geometry, such as a connector or capacitor soldering pad, introduces unwanted impedance discontinuities to the transmission line and degrades signal integrity. The best design carefully adds or removes copper around these discontinuities to compensate for the impedance change, on the other hand, it may not be a problem if you are lucky. Nevertheless, to truly ensure the design is not just borderline working but has guaranteed stability, it must be verified by testing, using Time Domain Reflectometer, Vector Network Analyzer, and/or inspecting the actual signal on an oscilloscope using the eye diagram.
Similarly, an incorrectly-bypassed power supply may cause random crashes. Such a bad power supply is easily created. For example, if two capacitor values are combined, at some frequency, the parasitic inductance of the first capacitor resonates with the second capacitor, forming a parallel LC circuit and can create a huge spike in the power supply impedance. If this impedance peak happens to be close the operating frequency of a subcircuit, it creates a serious noise problem. A good design would take these into consideration and ensure the power supply impedance is always below the specified target impedance throughout the frequency spectrum. Again, it may not be a problem if you are lucky, but only proper testing can confirm that.
A reputable company is more likely to validate the design, run a full compliance test, and pass the product certification before start selling this device. Meanwhile a no-name vendor sells whatever that powers on, often without regards to signal integrity, especially when you consider that an oscilloscope capable for testing USB 3.2's eye diagrams need a 10 GHz+ real-time bandwidth and costs up to $10,000. I'm not saying that buying from a reputable company is foolproof - it is not, you see sloppy work from time to time, but the chance of getting a tested system is higher.