Criminals clone samsung’s flagship ssd so well even pros get duped
A 1 TB Samsung 990 Pro that benches at 7 200 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark but collapses to HDD-grade speeds once the cache chokes is now sitting in Amazon and eBay shopping carts across Europe. It looks identical, feels identical, and—until you torture-test it—behaves identical. It is, however, a counterfeit built for the post-shortage era when every euro counts and every component is scalped.
The workshop pipeline is already industrial
Custom silk-screened PCBs, laser-etched labels, and firmware strings lifted from genuine drives arrive in Shenzhen parcels, are flashed with the Maxio MAP1602 controller instead of Samsung’s Pascal, and are then wrapped in shrink plastic cloned down to the micro-text. Akiba PC Watch’s lab in Tokyo unpacked one last week; the box passed a jeweller’s loupe test. The drive inside did not.
Under sustained writes the fake 990 Pro throttled to 450 MB/s—fifteen times slower than the real chip—because the criminals swapped Samsung’s TLC NAND for bargain-basement QLC and halved the DRAM buffer. The switch saves them roughly €35 per unit, enough to undercut legitimate retailers by 20 % and still clear a 60 % margin.
Marketplace algorithms favour the fraud
Amazon’s Buy Box rotates to the lowest-priced “new” seller within minutes; eBay pushes listings with fastest-shipping tags. Both platforms pocket commission before anyone realises the SKU is tainted. By the time negative reviews pile up, the storefront has evaporated and re-opened under a Chinese shell company with a new VAT number. Consumer-protection teams inside the marketplaces admit they still lack a forensic procedure to flag counterfeit SSDs at ingestion.
European customs seized 2 400 fake drives in Rotterdam last quarter, all labelled as “USB thumb drives” to dodge NAND import tariffs. That intercept equals barely 0.3 % of the estimated flow, according to the Anti-Counterfeiting Working Group for Semiconductor Devices.
Only two tools beat the scam
Samsung Magician’s built-in verification fails on first plug-in if the forger spoofs the firmware revision, but a secondary “PSID revert” command exposes the Maxio controller instantly. For buyers without a Samsung drive to compare, filling the entire advertised capacity with a 100 GB repeating loop and then reading it back reveals the cache cliff: genuine 990 Pros hold>6 GB/s for the full span; fakes drop below 500 MB/s after 120 GB. Any second-hand deal below €90 per TB should trigger that test before the refund window closes.
Retailers cannot be trusted to self-police. WD, Seagate and Kioxia have all seen cloned high-end models this year; Samsung is simply the latest scalp. Until marketplaces embed NAND-trace scanners in their fulfilment centres, the cheapest “new” SSD is probably the most expensive mistake you’ll make this upgrade cycle.