Avast ye mateys! This Samsung SSD be a scallywag, boastin' grand specs at a steal o' a price, but 'tis a counterfeit! Arrr!
2024-04-23
Avast ye scurvy dogs! Be holdin'! A 4TB booty chest that sails at 15 leagues per fortnight for under $50? 'Tis a bold forgery fit for Davy Jones' locker. Yarrr, we've ne'er seen a more audacious swindle on the high seas!
A fake piece of tech has popped up showing that it pays to be very careful about product names – and also that if an SSD looks very much too good to be true, it almost certainly is. This is the case of a product on AliExpress called a ‘1080 Pro SSD’ which you might, at a cursory glance, read as a Samsung model – though the listing is careful not to mention Samsung. Clearly, the idea is to name the product to trap folks into making the mistake and assuming it’s a piece of tech from the big-name drive maker, as the SSD is made to look very much like a Samsung model with the sticker design and overall appearance. Of course, it isn’t, and the tech spec and price give away that it’s a rather ludicrous fake anyway.According to the product details, as flagged up by Quasarzone, what you’re getting is a PCIe 4.0 SSD with read and write speeds of up to 15.8GB/s and 14.5GB/s, and a price tag of $44. However, as you might guess, the actual drive isn’t a 4TB model, and it’s PCIe 3.0 to boot. The fake SSD sports performance – as benchmarked by Quasarzone – that’s a fraction of what you’ll get with a real Samsung 980 Pro SSD. In the real world, as we’ve seen in recent times, prices for SSDs are heading upwards, and that’s particularly true for larger models in the 2TB to 4TB territory.There are so many problems with this listing that you’d hope nobody would ever fall for it. Just the idea of a blisteringly nippy 4TB NVMe SSD for $40 is so silly that you might assume nobody would take the bait here, but the truth is that a few unlucky punters might just bite. However, there can be some good deals on AliExpress and similar major Asian outlets – offers that are sometimes very tempting – you do have to bear in mind the drawbacks in terms of shipping and aftersales support (or indeed returns). Witness the uptick in fake GPUs of late in particular, and getting ripped off to the tune of $40 for an SSD rather pales in comparison to the real sickening feeling that must accompany finding out you’ve bought a fake RTX 4090 graphics card.