Fake Samsung SSDs with unbelievably slow speeds exposed

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 SATA SSDs, shows the drive does have a 4TB size. However, using H2testw to verify the capacity shows that write speeds drop drastically to 37MB/s once the SSD is filled to 100GB. That means verifying the entire drive would take around 24 hours. Read 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.