July 11, 2023
Fake Samsung solid-state drives (SSDs) have been found on AliExpress, a popular online retailer. These counterfeit drives are being sold for a fraction of the price of genuine Samsung SSDs, but they offer significantly worse performance.
One of the fake drives that was examined in a YouTube video by Roman “der8auer” Hartung was a 4TB “Samsung 980 EVO” SSD. This drive was being sold for just €40 (~$44), which is far below the price of a genuine 4TB Samsung 980 EVO SSD.
The fake drive that Hartung examined had inconsistencies like unprofessional boxes and errors. For example, the Samsung name was not printed on the front of the box, but it did appear on the controller in the image on the back of the box.
The drive itself also had several problems. There was no mention of Samsung on the drive, and the identifying marks had been laser etched off the controller. The drive also performed much worse than a genuine Samsung 980 EVO SSD. When tested, the fake drive had sequential read speeds of just 37 megabytes per second (MB/s), and sequential write speeds of 0.84 MB/s.
This is not the first time that fake Samsung SSDs have been found on AliExpress. In 2022, a third-party vendor on Walmart’s website was selling fake Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. These drives were also being sold at a fraction of the price of genuine Samsung 980 Pro SSDs, and they performed much worse.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechSpot.
