Fake Samsung 990 Pro passes basic checks but runs slower than a USB 2.0 drive
33 points by speckx
by tzs
2 subcomments
> We've heard countless SSD clone stories over the years, but this particular Samsung 990 Pro 2TB case stands out for the frighteningly sophisticated level of counterfeiting behind its creation. The label usually tells you whether a drive is legitimate. You can spot many telltale signs, such as incorrect model names, misaligned text, or poor print quality, that are more than sufficient to give the imposter away. But not this counterfeit Samsung 990 Pro.
How the heck can someone have the resources to produce or have produced counterfeit drive hardware and firmware but not have the resources to perfectly copy printing?
by jimrandomh
2 subcomments
The speed is kind of a red herring. The defining characteristic of fake drives is that they have less than the advertised capacity, but have a hacked firmware that misreports their capacity to the system, and fails when more than the actual capacity is written. So to find out whether a drive is fake, you have to fill it all the way and read the data back.
by lukevp
0 subcomment
Samsung Magician checks the drive to see if it’s genuine, I haven’t heard of any thwarting of that so far and it’s mentioned in the article that it correctly identified the counterfeit. What I do is check Samsung Magician genuine check first, then do its performance test, then use h2testw to fill it and verify that it passes fully. It’s a lot of work but it’s better than ending up with counterfeit stuff!
by robotnikman
0 subcomment
With prices going up I bet there will be many more counterfeiters now trying to take advantage of this.
by nubinetwork
0 subcomment
I recently bought 3 of these drives, thankfully mine appear to be legit... TFA doesn't say, but I wonder if theirs didn't come in original packaging...
by eviks
0 subcomment
> installed drive is running at PCIe 3.0, even though the Samsung 990 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 SSD.
That's a basic check
As is the speed test
Similar to how the article title passes basic checks, but is false
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