A fake technology has emerged that shows that it pays to be very careful with product names – and also that if an SSD looks good a lot too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
This is the case with a product on AliExpress called a ‘1080 Pro SSD’ which, at a cursory glance, you could read as a Samsung model – although the listing is careful not to mention Samsung.
The intention is clearly to name the product to trick people into making the mistake and assuming it is a piece of technology from the major drive manufacturer, as the SSD is made to look very similar to a Samsung model showing the sticker design and general features. appearance.
Of course it isn’t, and the technical specs and price reveal that it’s a rather ridiculous fake anyway. Although less tech-savvy consumers may still be fooled into grabbing this apparent bargain that, certainly at first glance, should be at the top of our list of the best SSDs.
According to the product details, as indicated by Quasar zoneWhat you get is a PCIe 4.0 SSD with read and write speeds of up to 15.8 GB/s and 14.5 GB/s, and a price tag of $44. Of course, there are more flags – of the red variety – on that game than we want to count.
There’s the fact that those truly blistering speeds aren’t even possible with PCIe 4.0 to begin with, and even outpace the best PCIe 5.0 drives. Then there’s also the obvious point that an SSD with such theoretical performance certainly wouldn’t cost just over $40. Oh, wait – we forgot that the capacity is supposedly 4TB – so this is also a huge SSD, for a very small price tag.
However, as you might guess, the actual drive isn’t a 4TB model and is PCIe 3.0 to boot. The fake SSD sports performance – as benchmarked by Quasarzone – is a fraction of what you get with a real Samsung 980 Pro SSD. For example, the latter’s read speed is 6.4 GB/s and what you get with the fake 1080 Pro is 1.18 GB/s, let alone the claimed 15.8 GB/s.
Analysis: Extreme counterfeits
In the real world, as we’ve seen lately, prices for SSDs are rising, and that’s especially true for larger models in the 2TB to 4TB range. Therefore, the scammer here may want to raise the hopes of potential buyers in this rather cruel way.
However, there are so many problems with this entry that you would hope no one would ever fall for it. The very idea of a blazing fast 4TB NVMe SSD for $40 is so silly that you might assume no one would take the bait here, but the truth is that a few unlucky gamblers might just bite. Perhaps knowing that they won’t even get the advertised product, but with the hope that the drive will deliver some respectable performance – and that it might be worth it for such a low, low price.
It’s not at all (worth a point) because as you can see, since Quasarzone was curious enough to actually buy and benchmark the SSD, the performance is pretty terrible. And of course, you can kiss any warranty goodbye, and we think it’s a safe bet that this is one cobbled-together piece of hardware that definitely doesn’t have a long lifespan. So buyers are best off making sure they have a good backup solution (well, you should have one anyway, to be honest).
While there can be some good deals on AliExpress and similar major Asian outlets – deals that can sometimes be very tempting – you do need to consider the drawbacks in terms of shipping and after-sales support (or even returns).
Plus, outright fakes like this SSD are of course always a danger, and some aren’t nearly as blatant as this attempt to deceive the poor. Some may have been made more convincing – and fake technology seems to be increasingly common these days.
Witness the increase in fake GPUs lately, and getting scammed out of $40 for an SSD pales quite a bit in comparison to the truly sickening feeling that must come with discovering you have a fake RTX 4090 graphics card (and there are other GPU curveballs besides these scams).
Through Tom’s hardware