Fake Samsung SSDs have been appearing on Aliexpress, conning shoppers into spending significant money on drives that, in some cases, can’t even offer USB thumb drive levels of performance. The drives include a 4TB Samsung 980 Evo, a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro, and two non-Samsung external SSD drives claiming to offer 32TB and 128TB of storage.
Crucially, those two Samsung drives don’t actually exist as real Samsung products, so it’s clear from the off that they’re fakes, but the more casual buyer could easily be fooled. Likewise, it’s not yet possible for a handheld portable SSD to offer 32TB and 128TB capacities, so the external drives are clearly fake too, but again many buyers wouldn’t be aware of this.
The drives were spotted and shared by a group member of the Discord channel of YouTuber Der8auer. Following up on the link, Der8auer purchased several of the drives to investigate what these mysterious drives were all about.
Sure enough, they all turned out to be bogus. The Samsung drives were real M.2 SSDs but with cheap NAND and controller chips used in place of the real thing, while the external drives were simply tiny USB-C-to-microSD adapters with a single microSD card mounted in them, surrounded by large aluminum cases.
As a result, the pretend Samsung 980 Evo offered terrible performance of just 36MB/s sequential read and 0.84MB/s sequential write, all while not providing the claimed 4TB of capacity. As you’ll see from our best SSD guide, the real Samsung 980 can achieve over 4,000MB/s read and 3,500MB/s write speeds, so this pretend Evo drive is many orders of magnitude off delivering acceptable performance. You can see it all in the video below.
It’s a similar story for the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro, with it failing to actually provide its claimed storage space and, although it did actually provide initially decent (though lower than advertised) performance of 2,472MB/s read and 1,056MB/s write, its sustained performance was unusably bad.
As for the two external SSDs, they fared even worse, with one delivering just 15MB/s read speed and the other failing to even work with the CrystalDiskMark benchmark used by der8auer.
Suffice it to say, while Aliexpress can be a fantastic place to find certain products and components, there are also a lot of fake or missold products so you need to carefully check exactly what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from. At the time of writing, there are still several clearly fake Samsung 980 SSD variants listed on the site. For a real Samsung SSD purchasing opportunity, check out the link below.
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