Before buying a computer product on a Chinese site, you must follow a series of steps. The first, check the seller, as they are often brand new or have very few units sold. Plus, if the reviews are mostly positive with few sales, there’s something fishy about that.
But the clearest indicators are in the product images. Often this is to mimic the original manufacturer’s images or take the original images directly and remove the name. There are a large number of SSDs on AliExpress that imitate Samsung’s and are fake.
Much worse than a mechanical hard drive
The intention of ‘der8auer’ was none other than to verify the quality of the purchased product. Although we can buy a fake solution or an imitation of a real unit, it does not have to be a bad product.
Spotting the fake drive didn’t cost this German overclocker much. The first fact that makes you suspect is that the The 4TB SSD that mimics Samsung drives costs just $40. A 1TB Samsung M.2 SSD costs around 80-100 dollars, so the first information that makes us suspect its falsity.
Without a doubt, where this unit “sings” the most is in the name. It is not marketed by South Korean Samsung does not have units with the name “980 EVO”. Even the font of the letters does not match the official one from Samsung.
When you receive the package, the box also leaves some weird things. The first, the image looks quite blurry, it is not a sharp image. We see that the cover image shows an M.2 NVMe SSD, because it has only one notch in the connector. But, we see below that the gears reading and writing indicated resemble those of a SATA M.2.
To top off this work of art, on the back is an amalgamation of slogans, terms and warranty promises that are nothing more than copy-and-paste.
Deleted the serial number like it was a car
Obviously “der8auer” wanted to check out the unit and the components it was carrying. He removed the typical sticker from one of these units and what he found was surprising. There SSD controller erased identifierit is therefore impossible to trace.
The next step was to try to verify the performance of the unit. Who knows, the same despite everything might have a decent performance and be a little worth it. Windows shows that the disk has 3.72 TB of free space, which is a good fact, since it does not lie in capacity. CrystalDisk has verified the information.
The next step is to test drive performance, which is not easy. You have found that completing this process, which normally takes a few minutes, could take hours. The test showed a a read speed of just over 36MB/s and a write of 0.84MB/s.
We talked about this drive being much slower than a hard drive, which is annoying. It is most likely based on faulty NAND flash memories and a faulty controller.
It’s not the only totally fake unit
Although the most striking thing in “der8auer”‘s video is the fake Samsung SSD, there are other fake storage drives he tested. These are pretty clear, by the abilities indicated by the unit.
First, we have a hypothesis 64TB external “Seagate” SSD ability. HDDs barely reach 20TB and SSDs 4TB, so the existence of a portable SSD of this capacity is impossible. Obviously, this is a total scam.
Next we have another imitation unit of a Seagate external solid state drive with no less than 128 TB capacity. More of the same, fake to more than power.
When you opened them, you found reality. The 64TB drive is actually a 64 GB microSD card blocked to a socket. While the 128GB drive has another 64GB micro SD card stuck to a socket. Come on, a real scam.
Finally we have a SSD “Samsung” 980 PRO from 4 TB to 50 dollars. Performance is around 2,500 MB/s read and 1,057 MB/s write. Not bad for the price, but performance suffers when caching has to come into play.
Worryingly, this “Samsung” unit has the ability to counterfeit. In fact, its capacity is less, probably 1TB at best, says der8auer.
