cheesy, there's not much that can go wrong with a SATA cable

You won't go wrong with ebay as long as you have at least a tiny amount of common sense.
I've bought those SATA cables before, and I've bought loads of stuff off of cheesefeat (the seller who's selling them on ebay). Don't be so scared of ebay just because one person had a problem once! That's just silly!
You remind me of a geezer who came on TPU asking for help but refused to use any free apps like CCleaner or Malware Bytes. He only wanted to use paid apps