Hardware counterfeits are becoming harder to spot with the naked eye, as experienced by an unlucky user who bought a fake Samsung 990 Pro SSD. When the SSD turned up, it couldn’t even beat a 20-year-old USB flash drive and turned out to be a fake.
Due to increasing storage prices, a Reddit user going by xox-lover jumped the gun after finding an enticingly priced Samsung 990 Pro SSD. Despite the unusually low ₹19,000 (£154) price tag, xox-lover felt safe, especially after experiencing previous exchanges with the same seller. For reference, this SSD model currently costs ₹30,000 (£243) at Amazon and Flipkart – an Indian marketplace, making the deal look especially sweet.
After installing the SSD, the sweet taste quickly turned sour, as the Redditor experienced extremely slow file transfers, with read speeds barely exceeding 20MB/s. Write speeds were more catastrophic, hardly reaching 10MB/s. Even USB 2.0 flash drives can reach faster speeds of up to 40MB/s. As a point of comparison, the Samsung 990 Pro is supposed to offer 7,450MB/s sequential reads and 6,900MB/s sequential writes, making it over 369x faster than this counterfeit drive.
Seeing this poor performance in Windows, xox-lover tested the counterfeit drive using CrystalDiskMark, which confirmed the abysmal 20.34MB/s sequential read and 9.65MB/s sequential write. The drive was also detected as a PCIe 3.0 SSD, which should be PCIe 4.0 on a legit Samsung 990 Pro. The scary thing is that, without this testing, there were no obvious red flags, meaning the situation could have continued beyond any return window.
At first, the Redditor wondered if this could be some sort of glitch or misconfiguration, so they updated their storage drivers and reseated the drive, but nothing changed. Confronted by reality, xox-lover installed Samsung’s Magician tool to be sure once and for all, whether this is a bug or a scam. To no one’s surprise, the SSD was indeed fake, with the brand’s software clearly indicating that the unit was counterfeit/non-genuine.
While a 30% or so discount may look exceptionally good, it pays to be wary and benchmark your hardware if you’re in doubt about its authenticity. Thankfully, xox-lover was lucky enough to buy from a retailer that has agreed to return the product.
