Counterfeit samsung 990 pro ssds flood amazon and ebay
Akiba’s lab just tore open what looked like a Samsung 990 Pro and found a $15 Maxio controller wrapped in a lie. The drive booted, benchmarked at 7 200 MB/s, even fooled CrystalDiskMark—until a 30 GB video file turned it into sticky tar. 15× slower than the real thing; same sticker, same box, same hologram.
The fake is faster—until it isn’t
Scalpers are recycling low-grade QLC flash, slapping it onto grey-market PCBs, and pumping the units through third-party storefronts on amazon, eBay and regional marketplaces. The profit margin is obscene: $30 in parts sold for $200–$600 depending on the Terabyte badge printed on the label. When RAM and NAND prices tripled after the chip crunch, counterfeiters smelled blood.
They cloned everything: the matte-black casing, the tiny QR code, even the Pascal firmware string. Only Samsung Magician spat out a serial number that doesn’t exist in the company’s Seoul database. By then the buyer had left five-star feedback.
Why your first speed test means nothing
Benchmark tools open a 1 GB window—child’s play for a cache rigged to lie. Akiba kept recording until SLC cache overflowed; throughput collapsed from 6 GB/s to 400 MB/s and latency spiked like a 2012 hard disk. The average user won’t notice until Windows update stalls or a game texture streams in late.
Worse, the counterfeiters now bake thermal throttling profiles into the firmware. The drive gently down-clocks instead of crashing, so the red flag never waves.
How to stay clean
Buy only from Samsung’s own portal or from sellers shipped and sold by Newegg or Best Buy. Ignore “fulfilled by amazon”; warehouse commingling mixes inventory with marketplace fakes. Flash Samsung Magician before you clone your OS; if the firmware field reads anything other than Samsung’s signature, yank the drive and charge back.
Run a 100 GB sustained write—any free tool like DiskSpd will do—then watch the speed graph. A genuine 990 Pro flatlines above 5 GB/s; a forgery folds in seconds.
And if the price looks like a steal, it already is.