Fake Samsung SSDs with unbelievably slow speeds exposed

[midian182]

Facepalm: Once again, fake Samsung Solid State Drives have been uncovered in the inventory of a well-known retailer. This discovery was made when a very cheap device was subjected to an examination and benchmarking test, revealing both its shockingly slow performance and several glaring inconsistencies.

Roman 'der8auer' Hartung, best known for his feats of extreme overclocking, posted a YouTube video examining several SSDs, including a "Samsung 980 EVO 4 TB," that were listed on AliExpress.

The first eye-raising element about this 4TB SSD is the 40 Euro ($44) price. For comparison, the Crucial MX500 4TB is around $359.99. The other unusual thing is that Samsung doesn't have a 980 EVO model.

The box also looks far from professional and has several discrepancies. While the Samsung name isn't on the cover, it does appear on the controller in the image, and the slogan for the older 870 EVO, as well as Samsung's name, appears on the back.

Also, the image suggests a single-key M.2 NVMe SSD, but the advertised speeds of 5,600 MB/s read and 5,300 MB/s write are associated with an M.2 SATA drive. Removing the drive shows it is an M.2 SATA.

There are plenty of other warning signs: there's no mention of Samsung on the device itself, the identifying marks have been laser etched off the controller, and there's no information relating to the Micron code numbers on the two flash NAND chips.

Testing the drive, which has to be done using an adapter as Hartung's board doesn't support M.2 SATA SSDs, shows the drive does have a 4TB size. However, using H2testw to verify the capacity shows that sequential read speeds drop drastically to 37MB/s once the SSD is filled to 100GB. That means verifying the entire drive would take around 24 hours. Sequential write speeds, meanwhile, were a shocking 0.84 MB/s

Some external drives, when tested, were revealed to contain nothing but a microSD inside, a trick similar to what was used by SSDs sold by a third-party Walmart vendor last year. There was also a fake Samsung 980 PRO 4TB (Samsung has not yet released a 4TB version) in the group that had similar issues.

This isn't the first instance of fake Samsung SSDs being spotted in the wild. Someone was selling 2TB Samsung 980 Pro SSDs for $127 earlier this year that used unofficial parts and had noticeably slower speeds.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99333-fake-samsung-ssds-unbelievably-slow-speeds-exposed.html

 

[BakaRed77]

If you buy any computer components on Aliexpress, Wish, Temu, etc. don't ever expect to get a legit product. Most of us know that by now.

 

[Puiu]

If it's too good to be true...

 

[Puiu]

If you buy any computer components on Aliexpress, Wish, Temu, etc. don't ever expect to get a legit product. Most of us know that by now.

There are legit products (I do buy from aliexpress from time to time), but you should always look out for scams.

 

[Uncle Al]

There should be a requirement for these companies to be completely upfront about such things, explained is simple language so everyone can understand what they are getting .....

 

[fps4ever]

There are legit products (I do buy from aliexpress from time to time), but you should always look out for scams.

If he is going to call them a scam then you have to include Amazon. Same scam crap can be found on there. Just have to do your research.

 

[trparky]

God, I'm glad that I live near a Microcenter.

 

[BigMeatyClackers]

I was going to try and get some of those older Samsung MLC flash based drives before they disappeared but most of the options looked pretty sketchy. Ended up just getting some optane instead. Even better endurance

 

[p51d007]

You get what you paid for.

 

[PenguinJoe]

Bought one of the Samsung 2TB 980 Pros when they came out. Was pretty fast. Little did I know the damn thing had a firmware bug that irreversibly ate my spare blocks by corrupting data. I didn't find out about this until just before the damn thing kicked over into permanent read only mode. Not even a firmware update will revive it so it now sits in a drawer as a reminder to avoid Samsung's NAND-based storage products.

That was the LAST Samsung M.2 drive I will ever buy. They are too damned overpriced and you just don't get the quality out of all that cash. Never again.

If it was one of these scam drives I would not be so disappointed. I know when thjings are priced too good to be true, you are getting what you pay for. In my case it came direct from Newegg, not from a third party supplier they sometimes use and paid the price for getting a genuine product.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

It sort of makes me laugh when I see morons buying from these online Chinese flea market. You get what you deserve. The real problem is how much of the scAmazon and fleaBay site are full of Chinese counterfeit products. Never ever buy an SD card from fleaBay.

 

[godrilla]

It sort of makes me laugh when I see morons buying from these online Chinese flea market. You get what you deserve. The real problem is how much of the scAmazon and fleaBay site are full of Chinese counterfeit products. Never ever buy an SD card from fleaBay.

I actually bought a SanDisk microsd pro extreme 256 gig from ebay years ago at a fraction of the cost. The main thing to look out for is to cross reference the product with the actual manufacturer website and the customer reviews. You can always return the product for a full refund. I recall I bought the fastest micro SD card on Amazon with the same capacity for 4 times the cost and they honored a full refund even after the cut-off time. In this case of the 990 pro 4 terabytes and 980 evo plus 4 terabytes, as Debauer mentioned, they dont exist by the manufacturer. Also if you do your research you can see that an 8 terabytes ssd costs north of $1k you have to be extremely gullible to believe that you can get a 64 and 128 terabyte ssd for any price because they don't exist at the consumer level especially at the price point. Take home message, do your research, I personally trust Amazon and ebay over Ali Express and would never buy anything from there.

 

[Julnor]

SSD costs are dropping nowadays, it might get to around that. I'm looking for a 4TB SSD to tide me over for some time, right now the WD Black ones go for $220, that's fine but I might wait for it to drop even more since I'm not in a hurry either.

 

[Hotlynx16]

If you buy any computer components on Aliexpress, Wish, Temu, etc. don't ever expect to get a legit product. Most of us know that by now.

The only thing I ever bought from aliexpress was some modified Xeons to work in a couple of old socket 775 computers I have for backups!They worked great and brought them up to 3.33MHz dual core with 16Gb ram, that is better than some modern laptops!!

 

[Hotlynx16]

If you buy any computer components on Aliexpress, Wish, Temu, etc. don't ever expect to get a legit product. Most of us know that by now.

I have seen some knock offs like that on Ebay also!!

 

[Gezzer]

IMHO the problem is all the 3rd party resellers. While some are legit, many are either running scams or unknowingly passing on fake products to their customers. On-line shopping became a minefield where you have to be very careful since sites starting promoting resellers as if they're part of the sites parent company. And Amazon is the worse one for this IMHO.

 

[hwertz]

If he is going to call them a scam then you have to include Amazon. Same scam crap can be found on there. Just have to do your research.

And what surprises me, Amazon's like "Well, we can't find all of them." Well sure, maybe, but you could at least search for "SSD" and start pickng off the obvious fakes right on page one. After the last time I tried to look (and found with recent drops in SSD prices, you had alarmingly some of the fakes selling for only $5-10 less than the "regular" price for 1TB models for instance), I decided I would simply not buy an SSD off Amazon, period. Their loss. (Actually I haven't purchased any SSDs after I got one two of those cheapy "controllerless" 128GB SSDs a few years back for like $20, and burned both out within a few months. My desktops are still 100% spinning rust, I mean a 16TB drive for under $200? That's too good a price per GB to consider buying SSD storage instead.)

 

[Hotlynx16]

And what surprises me, Amazon's like "Well, we can't find all of them." Well sure, maybe, but you could at least search for "SSD" and start pickng off the obvious fakes right on page one. After the last time I tried to look (and found with recent drops in SSD prices, you had alarmingly some of the fakes selling for only $5-10 less than the "regular" price for 1TB models for instance), I decided I would simply not buy an SSD off Amazon, period. Their loss. (Actually I haven't purchased any SSDs after I got one two of those cheapy "controllerless" 128GB SSDs a few years back for like $20, and burned both out within a few months. My desktops are still 100% spinning rust, I mean a 16TB drive for under $200? That's too good a price per GB to consider buying SSD storage instead.)

Heard Amazonk was selling some fake Sandisk USB sticks a while back and the looked real but the capacities didn't match up to what they said they were!

 

[Ben Myers]

Bought one of the Samsung 2TB 980 Pros when they came out. Was pretty fast. Little did I know the damn thing had a firmware bug that irreversibly ate my spare blocks by corrupting data. I didn't find out about this until just before the damn thing kicked over into permanent read only mode. Not even a firmware update will revive it so it now sits in a drawer as a reminder to avoid Samsung's NAND-based storage products.

That was the LAST Samsung M.2 drive I will ever buy. They are too damned overpriced and you just don't get the quality out of all that cash. Never again.

If it was one of these scam drives I would not be so disappointed. I know when thjings are priced too good to be true, you are getting what you pay for. In my case it came direct from Newegg, not from a third party supplier they sometimes use and paid the price for getting a genuine product.

Newegg, eBay, Amazon and Walmart all provide storefronts for 3rd parties. Lots of scams. Yes, I know, eBay is the original, selling ONLY 3rd party gear, because it has none of its own.

 

[godrilla]

Heard Amazonk was selling some fake Sandisk USB sticks a while back and the looked real but the capacities didn't match up to what they said they were!

In my case it was the performance that was lacking on the toppest tier 256 gig micro SD card but it wasn't from Amazon directly but a third party seller. The the price was very expensive and therfore there weren't too many reviews to go by ( Another tell). On ebay on the other hand the reviews were also 3rd party but the reviews showed actual performance numbers via snapshots and there were dozens of them and the seller had ten of thousands of positive reviews ( what to look for).

 

[erickmendes]

There are legit products (I do buy from aliexpress from time to time), but you should always look out for scams.

I second on that... My country (Brasil) had almost zero tax on Aliexpress products (rarely it was taxed)... So I got lots of hardware pieces from AliExpress... You got to be savy to not get caught on scam, still I scored a AM5 kit with Gigabyte B650m Elite AX motherboard plus 7600x and DDR5 32Gigs kit, a Ryzen 5600g, EK 240 AIO, and so on... Always went for recommended sellers with reputation and a sensible price, not those insanely cheap ones, all legit products.

You can get scammed buying crap anywhere in the world, It's not a AliExpress "priviledge".