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. Although less tech-savvy consumers may still be fooled into grabbing this apparent bargain that should, certainly on the face of it, be top of our best SSDs list.
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. Of course, there are more flags – of the red variety – on that play than we care to count.
There’s the fact that those truly blistering speeds aren’t even possible with PCIe 4.0 for starters, and indeed outstrip the top PCIe 5.0 drives. Then there’s also the obvious point that an SSD with such theoretical performance would most certainly not be priced at just over $40. Oh, wait – we forgot that the capacity is supposedly 4TB – so this is a huge SSD, too, for a teeny tiny price tag.
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. For example, the read speed of the latter is 6.4GB/s and what you’re getting with the fake 1080 Pro is 1.18GB/s, never mind the claimed 15.8GB/s.
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Analysis: Extreme fakes
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. Which is why the scammer here might be keen to get the hopes of potential buyers up in this rather cruel way.
However, 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. Perhaps in the knowledge that they’re not getting the advertised product, even, but with the hope that the drive will offer some kind of respectable performance – and that it’s maybe worth a punt at such a low, low price.
It isn’t (worth a punt), at all, because as you can see given that Quasarzone was curious enough to actually buy and benchmark the SSD, the performance is pretty terrible. And you can kiss any warranty goodbye, of course, and we would think it’s a safe bet that this is one cobbled together piece of hardware that definitely doesn’t have any longevity about it. So, buyers best make sure they have a good backup solution (well, you should have one of those anyway, to be fair).
While 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).
Plus, of course, outright fake products like this SSD are always a danger, and some aren’t nearly as blatant as this effort at duping poor unfortunates. Some may be more convincingly crafted – and fake tech in general seems like a more common occurrence these days.
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 (and there are other GPU curveballs besides these kind of scams).
Via Tom’s Hardware