I Got Scammed - Fake 4TB Samsung SSD from AliExpress

foreign welcome back to another video a few weeks ago somebody posted on my Discord server an offer from AliExpress about this Samsung 980 Evo with 4 terabyte for 40 Euro which seemed an offer too good to be true especially thinking about that a 980 Evo doesn't even exist and that's when I thought okay maybe we should buy this instead of him and find out what this is about and then I came across a few more stuff like this 128 terabyte external SSD so I bought all of them we're going to investigate them that should be quite fun today's video is powered by hatzner with the ax 52 dedicated root server with the powerful ryzen 7700 8 core CPU and 64 gigabytes ddr4 memory in the base config the ax 52 is the perfect all-rounder two quick one terabyte Gen4 and vme ssds are available to rapidly access your data if you wish you can also extend this further for example with two additional two terabyte nvme ssds or two 16 terabyte hdds depending on your requirements you can select either Germany or Finland as location of your new dedicated root server find out more in the link below as I already said 1980 Evo doesn't even exist which is quite interesting and then we have a 990 Pro which theoretically does exist ssq but not with 4 terabyte at least not yet something announced this that it's going to come but at least right now it's not available yet so that's already something that sounds quite fishy especially if you think about that this is 40 Euro this is 50 Euro that's already quite something might be wrong here but then I came across those external ssds this one states that it comes with 64 terabyte of capacity and then we have this one with 128 gigabyte capacity if you think about it the biggest ssds you can easily buy and somewhere at around 30 terabyte and they're already quite expensive at least I would say 2000 to 3 000 Euro for one of those with 30 terabyte capacity I know that there are 64 terabyte capacity ssds but they are very hard to get if they are available and they are definitely in the high four digit amount of price maybe like eight eight to ten thousand Euros something in that direction so getting this for 30 Euros seems to be quite odd we will start with the external drive that states 64 terabyte and already on the packaging everything is like kind of hot it says gold then I mean it was probably not made for being shipped with the gold one otherwise they would probably check the color it says hard drive enclosure and if we turn it around the product interface States USB 3 o micro b then USB 3.1 type c gen 1 and then on the bottom it says supports hard disk Ender 2 well not even m.2 it says M2 then ngff which is next Generation form factor so what is it why is it is it a hard drive is it something for m.2 ssds and what kind of interface is it because I don't know so indeed it's USBC and not the micro b but it's also very light let's plug it in and see so let's check what we can actually see in Windows once this SSD is attached so it shows up as SSD with a 61 terabyte of 61 terabyte available I can also access the device so that first look all looks fine to me if we check the properties of the SSD it shows that the file system is xfat which is not usual for an SSD at least as far as I know I also tried to read out this SSD with Crystal disk info but as you can see only my main SSD which is a real 980 Pro 2 terabyte shows up but even with like extended detection I cannot see the SSD in here in device manager at least it pops up as SDK SSD USB device but let's check with Crystal disk micro what kind of performance we can see you can see it's listed as device number D and I think with Crystal diskmark and whatever performance we can see might be an indicator of what's actually inside this SSD it all already takes forever to create the test file I think already like three minutes which is definitely unusual so sequential read it's not even a 16 megabyte per second and right it's 8 megabyte per second already that is an indicator that's I mean this this cannot be a real SSD something has to be wrong here I'm going to use the H2 test W software set to the correct device so that's D and I'm now going to write and verify and see what kind of space we actually have instead of the 64 terabyte which is written here but let's see write and verify might take a very long time well I think this reads that it will take 1600 hours of testing which kind of makes sense because it will try to write all the 64 terabytes with 11.8 megabyte per second let's see I will probably just leave the system running overnight one hour of testing a passed and we are at about a 66 gigabyte and as you can see the time remaining is about 1000 hours but I have hope that I don't have to wait as long let's see how big this actually is after over two hours in tests and 150 gigabyte of tests I also spend a bit more time researching online and it seems like the better approach is to set a specific Target test size you can set only let's say 128 gigabyte in this case but it's because that's maybe a more plausible size so I will set like 130 gigabyte and then test again because after you increase that specific size it will be verified and then we should find out if it's legit or not all right I also just noticed that the 150 gigabyte which I did test with writing I can now also verify so I will just wait for this time and let's see what happens now we are getting there another hour and you can see that it said after 58 gigabyte okay and after that 5.2 gigabyte data loss so essentially this SSD has a real capacity of 64 gigabyte instead of 64 terabyte kind of as expected we don't have real 64 terabyte of capacity we have a thousandth of it so it's only 64 gigabyte and yeah if you research this online you quickly find this kind of SD card scam not quite sure how it works but it seems like there is a 64 gigabyte SD card inside and some controller that may make this drive appear as a 64 terabyte capacity so I have a quite bad feeling about this one okay the Backup Plus Slim 128 terabyte again advertised size USB 3.0 it's as stated on the drive if we turn it to the side it says connect with computers I mean obviously if we turn it to the other side you can see the small Asterix and it says internet connection required which is for this on the back if you want to backup your computer with included software and surprise there is no software included you need internet and if you want to use it between Windows and Mac you also need internet this all just doesn't make any kind of sense opening the box I just noticed that it says three years limited warranty and then it's linking to Seagate I'm not quite sure which I don't know Shaq in China made these but I'm pretty sure it was not Seagate pretty sure the only positive thing about this is the nice brush aluminum case doesn't look bad at all I have to admit that still it's extremely light says USB 3.0 and then we have the micro b connector let's just plug it in the 128 terabyte SSD is surprisingly detected as an HDD which I find kind of funny and it's probably exactly the same just with twice as fake I'm not sure if I go to properties it's also detected with xfat file system it's again not detected by Crystal disk info as you can see and let's just check the speed so that was great I selected 512 instead of one gigabyte because I thought it might just be quicker to create a test file and then while it was doing the sequential read there appeared a message that there is a problem with this USB device and you can see it just disappeared so I couldn't even finish any kind of read or write test that's great with this SSD we're going to try axle flash test which apparently helps to restore it to the actual file size and for that we just go to restore factory size oops not sure if that's a good thing or not probably not so as you can see it's again gone from my system and I mean this device is so unstable that I cannot do any kind of test nothing I think it's time to go over to the interesting part opening these up to check what's inside I already took a small screwdriver to try to open this because there are like no visible screws because I'm quite confident that the seller or maker of these tries everything to hide what's inside we start with a big one I think I will just saw all the way down here on the back should be the best way to do it especially on the big one because it's so light I don't think there's a lot inside I'm trying to yeah get you some light inside but you can probably see it a little bit it's a big case and there is a tiny PCB in the center that is pretty much what we expected it's neither an HDD nor an SSD it's just basically a USB to micro SD adapter with one SD card inside everything is glued you can see even the SD card is glued into the adapter yeah that was kind of as expected so let's move over to the small one and see if we just find exactly the same thing inside surprisingly the PCB actually in the small one is bigger than it in the big one so it's not exactly the same PCB probably exactly the same type of scam on the the big case we had the possibility to have two of those micro SDs in there and here's only one but yeah it's just the same kind of kind of scam we will now remove these pcbs and then go back to my studio and take a closer look here we have both pcbs and they are so similar that you can be certain that both come from the same kind of scam company they're both labeled in the same way this one says ca816 this one ca828 so yeah it's the same kind of marking same style same type of PCB also if you pay attention to the controller you might be able to see that somebody removed the marking on both of these microcontrollers to make sure that you cannot track back easily what kind of IC is actually on there so somebody is trying to hide their scam same goes for the SD card on the front there is no marking on the back side there is a marking you could Google and if you try to Google you cannot really find anything useful but you will get directed to the SanDisk website yeah with the topic of SD card scams so yeah it's probably also counterfeit SD card but what I want to find out now is what happens if we plug this specific SD card just in a normal SD card reader what kind of capacity we will see without this additional controller immediately after plugging it in it tells me that I have to format the drive if I go to the drive monitoring of Windows it tells me that it's a normal 64 gigabyte device SD card whatever with raw file system so I have to format it first and formatting the device also worked I just changed to NTFS I performed another performance test run with this micro SD card just connected to the system which showed about 20 megabytes per second in reading about 10 in right and if you think about this a 64 gigabyte capacity SD card with this kind of speed will cost in the mass Market something between one and two dollar and then if you think about that this PCB with these like tiny amount of components on it is probably also another dollar and then you have the casing and some packaging so it ends up probably somewhere between three and four dollar for this entire product and they're selling it for 40 dollar so that is a huge margin for just a huge scam and that's what it is in the end it's just a pure scam a typical thing that happens with China and AliExpress it is the way it is but if things appear to be good to be true they usually are especially with ssds memory and also CPUs but let's continue with m.2 ssds this package has so many weird and obscure things on it so starting off with the 980 Evo which doesn't even exist from Samsung it doesn't read Samsung as a logo itself but we can see Samsung on this controller on here it states four terabyte of capacity and also that the read speed is 560 megabytes per second and the write speed is 530 megabyte per second but if we turn it around it says 980 Evo SSD M2 and GFF which is New Generation form factor something something that was used for advertising back in the days the definitive SSD for every need that's actually the slogan of an 870 Evo so completely different SSD but if you check the backside it's stating a lot of Samsung stuff so for more details warranty product information visit samsung.com also Samsung Electronics limited so yeah they're basically pretending to be Samsung and what's kind of funny is that if you pay attention to the slot right here that is indicating an m.2 nvme SSD but the speed of 560 megabyte per second read and 530 right just indicates that this should be a SATA drive and out of the box that is pretty much what we expected we have a different connectory which is indicating that SATA SSD and not an nvme SSD and also there is nothing something on there it's just delay delays Electronics limited something so something Chinese for sure it's also stating vnan which I don't think and also not sure about a four terabyte capacity also if you want to try out if you want to go to this link it will end up nowhere but let's peel off the sticker and take a look underneath very similar again to our SD card scam the vendor is trying to hide something because they laser etched away the markings on the controller also if you check out the flash chips there is a logo on there which kind of reminds me of some Micron stuff then I went to Micron and checked for the code that's on there couldn't find anything so I literally have no information what we have here so I think we just add it to the system and let's take a look the test setup I'm running currently is a b650e hours Master which does not support SATA M2 ssds that's why I'm trying to use this external connection adapter which I often use for like fetching the data quickly if I forgot about it from an m.2 device and I think this should work with SATA devices so it has current and we can also see an LED on the SSD at least this one straight shows up with four terabyte capacity also with Crystal disk info First Look seems kind of fine was powered on twice and also reads out four terabyte of size my original plan was to also verify the capacity with H2 test W but as you can see after 100 gigabyte of a test capacity the right rates dropped drastically to about a 37 megabytes per second and I'm just only verifying the first terabyte right now which would take about another seven hours and then I would have to verify everything so to verify all of the four terabytes to First write and then verify would take approximately 24 hours which I'm not willing to spend on this drive right now this thing is extremely painful and slow because I just performed a sequential read and write test we had about I think 36 megabyte per second in a read end 0.8 megabyte per second and right that is a new negative record I think so this is kind of like an extremely slow and expensive USB stick kind of because it's kind of even worse than that absolutely not recommended to buy any of this but what about the 990 Pro the 990 Pro because just judging by the key this should be an nvme SSD the packaging looks identical to the other one with a few exceptions it says a 3500 megabyte per second read on the bottom and it's listing nvme SSD 4 terabyte but it's the same type of packaging it's for sure the same kind of scam vendor again if you turn it around it's listing some Samsung stuff which is definitely not going to be the case but it comes with five years warranty instead of three so maybe that's better looking at this it looks a bit better though just by the first look because we have a bit more ICS on there so yeah not quite sure about this one but let's peel off the sticker same thing again somebody tried to etch away the markings on this control IC for whatever reason but we have more flash storage again though we don't find any kind of cache so that's an indication that for sure reads and write rates will drop drastically the first looking crystallis info is already great my real Samsung 980 Pro looks good if I switch over to this one it's s 100 bad yeah that's already promising even though it says 100 bad sequential read I mean it's about 1 000 megabyte below the advertised speed still 2500 megabytes per second seems like a usable size just waiting for the right speed even sequential right doesn't look that bad at least with the very quick load we have about 1000 megabytes per second I'm not testing again on real capacity with H2 test W and as you can see with about 41 seconds elapsed time we are still riding with about one gigabyte per second but I'm expecting this to drop quite drastically due to the missing cache which we can see already right now so I'm not quite sure what will happen time wise but let's check back maybe in like two or three minutes after almost 10 minutes it dropped quite heavily it's at 180 megabyte per second right now it's still dropping slowly but it's still dropping with this speed I could still finish this test in about three hours then I would still have to verify it let's see how this turns out after maybe an hour after three hours of riding to the drive and only achieving a 240 gigabyte we have a remaining time of almost one full day and that's only for the riding part we would still have to verify all of this data so just the test itself would take almost two days which I'm not willing to spend and it shows what kind of garbage this drive is in the end the result was kind of obvious and especially looking at something like this the 128 terabyte external SSD which is even called Backup Plus if you're thinking to get one of these drives especially for backups that is um like a very stupid idea because like you're going to ruin your data guaranteed that's something you should not use ever for any kind of like storage and the same goes to those M2 ssds and I mean the fun part is that this one that's a SATA drive if I went to the online offer at AliExpress it didn't even state that it's a SATA drive it was listed as 2023 Samsung latest Gen m.2 4 terabyte SSD 440 Euro which obviously it's not going to make sense because 40 Euro for or like 40 dollar for four terabyte it's not gonna work out no matter how you're going to try it this capacity of memory is just not available for this price and it will like for a long time not be and it's simple as that if you're looking online for storage and you see something that's like like I don't know a third of the price probably not legit and it's actually what you have here and even the nvme SSD that kind of looked a little bit better still have to keep in mind that even though it's performed quite okay first look in Crystal disk info this thing is not going to contain four terabyte I think it's best case a one terabyte SSD and I mean if they fake the capacity then you don't know what else is fake and how reliable is it going to be you saw that the read and write speeds they just drastically stop working after the tiniest amount of load because it also doesn't contain any kind of dram cache so just just stay away from any kind of drives like this I mean data in the end is just very valuable especially to you as a consumer if you have your personal data on there and it's getting lost it was probably not worth saving money on this that was a bit of a different video because right now at least it feels to me like in our scene there is not much interesting stuff going on it's also summer and it's very hot in here and so I just felt like doing a different video than usual I hope you also enjoyed this enjoy the rest of your Sunday see you soon bye thank you

Channel: der8auer EN

Views: 270,386

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Id: 4q8SiZcllFA

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023