The adage that some things are too good to be true never gets old. Latest videos of TechTuber Roman ‘der8auer’ Hartung. An extreme overclocking expert was warned by a kind subscriber about his 4TB SSD under the Samsung brand with a very attractive price on the AliExpress marketplace. Simply put, these drives were fake, as you can see from the title of the video below.
Der8auer’s skepticism about the authenticity of these AliExpress-advertised SSDs isn’t just driven by their incredible prices. This particular “Samsung” 4TB SSD he was €40 (about $44). Another caveat as to whether this is genuine came from the model name/number. The “Samsung 980 EVO” does not exist in Samsung’s product catalog, let alone the 4TB version.
A closer look at the packaging revealed many other failures and discrepancies by counterfeit manufacturers. The front of the “Samsung 980 EVO” shows his M.2 device with a single key. This should be his NVMe device, but the advertised transfer speeds match his M.2 SATA device. Indeed, when I unpacked the drive, I discovered it was M.2 SATA. The back of the package had a jumble of copied slogans, conditions and warranty promises.
After opening, der8auer continued visual inspection and various strange flags for “Samsung” drives. Peeling off the sticker revealed that the person who assembled this M.2 device of his had erased the identifying markings from his SSD controller chip. Despite being able to read some code numbers on flash NAND chips (he only has two on this single-sided SSD), der8auer was unable to find any technical information about them.
Moving on to testing, der8auer put the new “Samsung 980 EVO 4TB” drive through some system information and benchmarking tools. When I connected the M.2 device, Windows showed it as a free volume of 3.72 TB. CrystalDisk Info agreed with this initial assessment and the information fields were fully filled.
Der8auer’s attempts to validate the capacity of new SSDs met with a substantial roadblock as it became apparent that this process would take at least 24 hours to complete. Yes, after an initial sharp increase in speed, it started going very slowly. Switching to his benchmarks tab for the same tool, sequential read and write speeds were 36.25 MB/s and his was 0.84 MB/s, which explains why the capacity verification task is “painful and slow.” This is kind of a downside, as it’s hard to find flash storage that slow these days.
Other Storage Products You Should Never Avoid
As a footnote, der8auer noticed other attractive SSDs while browsing the “Samsung 980 EVO 4TB” headline. He couldn’t help but add the following items to his basket:
- External “Seagate” SSD with advertised 64TB capacity,
- A similar “Seagate” external SSD boasts a staggering 128TB capacity.
- And another M.2 drive, this time claiming to be a “Samsung 980 PRO 4TB” (a Samsung SKU that hasn’t shipped yet).
It turned out that the external drive bulleted above contained a small PCB with a 64GB microSD card glued into its socket. However, the purported Samsung 980 PRO 4TB (€50) offered nearly acceptable performance of 2,473 MB/s read and 1,057 MB/s write until the cache shortage became apparent. Again the capacity (4TB in this case) was disguised. Additionally, the so-called 980 PRO 4TB capacity was probably the “best case 1TB,” der8auer said.
