The Samsung 980 Pro was, at its time, one of the best NVMe Gen4 SSDs on the market, up until its parent company replaced it with the 990 Pro. By virtue of its popularity, it should come as no surprise that in China, knockoffs and fake versions of the SSD have already found themselves in circulation.
The discovery of these fake Samsung 980 Pro SSDs were initially posted by 포시포시 (@harukaze5719), themselves having picked up the existence of the knockoff NVMe Gen4 SSD from one Chinese users on Baidu. The storage component bore all the trimmings of authenticity: It sported the 980 Pro 2TB Sticker on top, and the firmware on it, fake as it was, was so good that it even managed to fool Samsung Magician software.
[FAKE] Samsung 980 PRO SSDhttps://t.co/SjcIDPpmmd pic.twitter.com/OXbEqz9Avd
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) March 14, 2023
Once the sticker was removed, though, the scam and forgery on the fake Samsung 980 Pro was plain to see. For context, Samsung produces and uses its own SSD controllers and NAND chips. In this case, the authentic version of the 980 Pro uses an 8nm Elpis controller with DRAM, while the NAND chips are 128-layer TLC 3D VNAND.
In the case of the fake Samsung 980 Pro, the Chinese user showed that it was fitted with a 12nm process node from TSMC, and featured a DRAM-less design. Further, its controller was a Chinese YMTC 128-layer 3D NAND, which was built using Xtacking 2.0 technology.
As for how much these fake Samsung 980 Pro SSDs were being sold for, the unscrupulous sellers were charging US$127.77 (~RM572) for 2TB, which is a red flag in and of itself. When we purchased our 980 Pro, we had to fork out RM890, and that was for the 1TB variant.
Then there are the speeds of the fake Samsung 980 Pro. The genuine component has average sequential read and write speeds of 7000MB/s and 5000MB/s, respectively. The fake 980 Pro, however, had average sequential read and write speeds of 4300MB/s and 4000MB/s. While that’s not inherently slow, that’s still obviously not the kind of speeds you’d expect from the real SSD.
The SSD notwithstanding, it’s clear that such scams aren’t going away anytime soon and that these dishonest sellers and individuals are always going to find a way to make a quick buck off of gullible and non-tech-savvy consumers, especially in countries like China. On that note, the moral of this story is the same as all stories about fake goods: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
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