I Got Scammed - Fake 4TB Samsung SSD from AliExpress

foreigner welcome back to another video a few weeks ago someone posted on my Discord server an AliExpress offer on this 4 terabyte Samsung 980 Evo for 40 euros that seemed like an offer that was too good to be true, especially considering that a 980 Evo wouldn't even exists and that's when I thought maybe we should buy this instead and find out what it is and then I found a few more things like this 128 terabyte external SSD so I bought them all and let's investigate. them, that should be quite fun, today's video is powered by Hatzner with the ax 52 dedicated root server with the powerful 8-core ryzen 7700 CPU and 64 gigabytes of ddr4 memory in the base configuration, the ax 52 is the perfect all-rounder , two fast and one terabyte Gen4. and vme ssd are available to quickly access your data if you want, you can also expand this further, for example with two additional two terabyte nvme ssd or two 16 terabyte hard drives, depending on your requirements you can select Germany or Finland as the location of your new dedicated hard drive. 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 exists ssq but not with 4 terabytes, at least not yet, something announced that It's going to come, but at least at the moment it's not available yet, so it's already something that sounds quite suspicious, especially if you think that this costs 40 euros, this costs 50 euros, that's already enough, something could be wrong here , but then I came across those external SSDs. this one says it comes with 64 terabytes of capacity and then we have this one with 128 gigabytes of capacity, if you think about it, the largest SSDs you can easily buy and around 30 terabytes and they are already quite expensive, at least I would.

Let's say 2000 to 3000 euros for one of those with 30 terabytes of capacity. I know there are SSDs with a capacity of 64 terabytes, but they are very difficult to get if they are available and they definitely have a high four-digit price tag, maybe like eight eight. at ten thousand euros something in that direction, so getting this for 30 euros seems quite strange. We will start with the external drive which indicates 64 terabytes and already on the package everything is a little hot, it says gold, so I mean it was probably not made to be shipped with the gold, otherwise they would probably check the color, it says casing hard drive and if we turn it over, the product interface indicates USB 3 or micro b, then USB 3.1 type c gen 1 and then at the bottom it says supports Ender 2 hard drive, well, not even m.2 says M2 and then ngff which is the next generation form factor, so what is it?

Why is it a hard drive? Is it something for m.2 SSD and what type of interface is it? I don't know, it's actually USBC and not the micro b, but it's also very light, plug it in and see, so let's check what we can actually see in Windows once this SSD is plugged in so it appears as SSD with 61 terabytes. of 61 terabytes available I can also access the device so at first glance everything seems fine to me if we check the properties of the SSD it shows that the file system is xfat which is not usual in an SSD at least as far as I know I also tried reading this SSD with Crystal drive information, but as you can see only my main SSD shows up which is a real 2 terabyte 980 Pro, but even with similar extended detection I can't see the SSD here in device manager, at least appears. as USB SDK SSD 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 any performance we can see could be an indicator of what's actually inside this. SSD, it already takes forever to create the test file. I think it's already like three minutes, which is definitely unusual, so the sequential read is not even 16 megabytes per second and, of course, it's already 8 megabytes per second, that's an indicator. I mean, this can't. To be a real SSD, something has to be wrong here. I'm going to use the H2 test W software set to the right device, so that's D and now I'm going to write, check and see what kind of space we actually have instead of the 64 terabytes that are written here, but let's see, write and verify, they can take a long time.

I think this says it will take 1600 hours of testing, which makes sense because it will try to write the 64 terabytes with 11.8 megabytes. per second, let's see, I'll probably leave the system running overnight. One hour of testing has passed and we're at about 66 gigabytes and as you can see the remaining time is about 1000 hours, but I'm hoping I don't have to. wait a bit, let's see how big this actually is after more than two hours of testing and 150 gigabytes of testing. I also spend a little more time researching online and it seems like the best approach is to set a specific target test size that you can just set. let's say 128 gigabytes in this case but it is because maybe it is a more plausible size so I will set 130 gigabytes and then test again because after increasing that specific size it will be checked and then we should find out if it is legit or not.

I also just realized that the 150 gigabytes that I tried with writing now I can also verify them, so I will wait for this moment and see what happens now, we are getting there in another hour and you can see it said after 58 gigabytes, okay? and after that 5.2 gigabyte data loss, essentially this SSD has an actual capacity of 64 gigabytes instead of 64 terabytes, as expected, we don't have an actual 64 terabytes of capacity, we have a thousandth of that, so they are only 64 gigabytes and yes if you research this online you quickly find this type of SD card scam, I'm not really sure how it works but it seems like there is a 64 gigabyte SD card inside and some driver that can make this drive looks like a 64 terabyte capacity so I have a pretty bad feeling about this one, okay, Backup Plus Slim 128 terabyte is again advertised in USB 3.0 size, it is as indicated on the drive, if we turn it to the side it says connect with computers, I mean, obviously, if we turn it the other way, you can see the little Asterix and it says Internet connection required, which is for this on the back, if you want to back up your computer with the software included 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.

All of this just doesn't make any kind of sense upon opening the box, I noticed it says three year limited warranty and then links to Seagate. I'm not really sure which one, I don't know, Shaq in China made these, but I. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Seagate. I'm pretty sure the only positive thing about this is that the nice brushed aluminum casing doesn't look bad at all. I must admit that it is still extremely light, it says USB 3.0 and then we have the micro b connector. plug it into the 128 terabyte SSD and it surprisingly detects itself as a hard drive, which I find a bit funny and is probably exactly the same thing just twice as

fake

.

Not sure if I go to properties, it is also detected with the xfat file system, again no. detected by the Crystal disk information as you can see and let's check the speed, so that was great. I selected 512 instead of one gigabyte because I thought it might be faster to create a test file and then while doing the sequential read a message popped up saying 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, which is great with this SSD, we are going to try the spindle flash test which apparently helps restore it to the actual file size and for that we are just going to restore factory size.

Wow, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, probably not, as you can see, again it disappeared from my system and I mean, this device is so unstable that I can't do any kind of testing, nothing. I think it's time to move on to the interesting part, opening them to check what's inside. I already took a small screwdriver to try to open this because there are no visible screws because I'm pretty sure the seller or manufacturer of these tries everything possible to hide what's inside. We start with a big one. I think I'll just see it up to here on the back should be the best way to do it, especially on the large one because it's so light.

Don't think there's much inside. I'm trying to bring some light inside to you, but you can probably see it a little bit. It's a big box and there's a small PCB in the center which is pretty much what we expected. It is neither of the two things. neither a HDD nor an SSD, it's basically a USB to micro SD adapter with an SD card inside, everything is glued, you can see that even the SD card is glued to the adapter, yes, that was more or less expected, so let's move on to the small and Let's see if we find exactly the same thing inside.

Surprisingly, the PCB actually on the small one is larger than on the large one, so it's not exactly the same PCB, it's probably exactly the same type of scam on the large case that we had the chance to have. I have two of those micro SD there and here there is only one, but yes, it is the same type of scam. Now we'll remove these PCBs and then we'll go back to my studio and take a closer look. Here we have both PCBs and they are so similar, you can be sure that they both come from the same type of fraudulent company.

They are both labeled the same. This one says ca816, this one ca828, so yes, it's the same type of brand, same style, same type of PCB too if you pay. Pay attention to the controller, he may be able to see that someone removed the marking on both microcontrollers to make sure he can't easily track what kind of IC is really there, so someone is trying to hide their scam. The same goes for SD. card on the front there is no mark on the back there is a mark you can google and if you try to google you can't find anything useful but you will be directed to the SanDisk website yes with the topic of card scams SD, so yeah.

It's probably a counterfeit SD card as well, but what I want to know now is what happens if we plug this specific SD card only into a regular SD card reader, what kind of capacity will we see without this extra driver immediately after plugging it in? that I have to format the drive, if I go to windows drive monitoring it tells me that it is a normal 64 gigabyte device SD card with a raw file system, so I have to format it first and format the device as well it worked. I just switched to NTFS I ran another performance test with this micro SD card just plugged into the system which showed about 20 megabytes per second reading, about 10 on the right and if you think about this, a 64 gigabyte capacity SD card with this type of speed will cost on the mass market between one and two dollars and then if you think about this PCB with this small number of components it probably also costs another dollar and then you have the case and some packaging, so it will probably end up between three and four dollars for all this product and they are selling it for 40 dollars, so it is a huge margin for a big scam and that is what it is in the end is just a pure scam, something typical that happens with China and AliExpress. as it is, but if things seem to be good to be true, they usually are especially with ssds memory and also with CPUs, but let's continue with the m.2 ssds, this package has so many strange and obscure things, so Let's start with the 980 Evo. which doesn't even exist in Samsung, it doesn't read Samsung as a logo itself, but we can see Samsung on this driver here, it indicates four terabytes of capacity and also that the read speed is 560 megabytes per second and the write speed is 530 megabytes per second, but if we turn it around it says 980 Evo SSD M2 and GFF, which is a new generation form factor, something that was used for advertising in the past, the ultimate SSD for every need, that is actually the slogan of an 870 Evo.

Completely different SSD but if you check the back it says a lot of things from Samsung so for more details warranty product information visit

samsung

.com also Samsung Electronics Limited so yeah they basically pretend to be Samsung and what's funny is that if you pay attention to the slot here it indicates an m.2 nvme SSD, but the read speed of 560 megabytes per second and 530 on the right only indicates that it should be a SATA drive and, out of the box , it's more or less what we expected. it has a different connector that indicates it's a SATA SSD and not an nvme SSD and there's nothing there either, it's just lags, lags.

The electronics limited something, so something Chinese surely also indicates vnan, which I don't believe and I'm not sure either. a four terabyte capacity as well, if you want to try if you want to go to this link it won't end up anywhere but let's remove the label and take a look underneath, very similar again to our SD card scam, the vendor is trying to hide something . because they laser engraved the marks on thecontroller and if you look at the flash chips there is a logo there that reminds me of some Micron stuff, then I went to Micron and checked the code that was there and couldn't find it. nothing so I literally have no information on what we have here so I think let's just add it to the system and let's take a look at the test setup I'm currently running it's a b650e hours Master which doesn't support SATA M2 SSD it's because I'm trying to use this external connection adapter that I use often to recover data quickly if I forgot it from an m.2 device and I think this should work with SATA devices so that it has power and we can also see an LED on.

The SSD, at least this one, appears directly with a capacity of four terabytes and also with Crystal disk information. At first glance it seems fine, it turned on twice and also read four terabytes in size on my The original plan was to also check the capacity with the H2 W test, but as you can see after 100 gigabytes of test capacity the correct speeds dropped drastically at about 37 megabytes per second and I'm only checking the first terabyte right now which would take about another seven hours and then I'd have to check everything, so checking the four terabytes to write first and then checking would take about 24 hours , which I am not willing to spend on this unit at this time.

This is extremely painful. and slow because I just ran a sequential read and write test where we had about, I think, 36 megabytes per second on a final read of 0.8 megabytes per second and, of course, that's a new negative record. I think this is something like extremely slow and expensive. A USB stick because it is even worse than that, it is not recommended at all to buy any of this, but what about the 990 Pro? The 990 Pro because judging by the key it should be an nvme SSD, the packaging looks identical to the other with with a few exceptions it says a reading of 3500 megabytes per second at the bottom and lists 4 terabyte nvme SSD but it is the same type of packaging.

It is for sure the same type of scam provider again. If you turn it around, it lists some things from Samsung, which are definitely not going to be the case, but it comes with a five year warranty instead of three, so maybe it's better to look at it, although it looks a little better at first glance because we have a bit more ICS in there, so yeah, not too sure. this one, but let's remove the label, same thing again, someone tried to clear the markings on this control IC for whatever reason, but we have more flash storage again, although we didn't find any kind of cache, so it's an indication that with security is read. and write rates will drop drastically the first Crystallis info I look at is already great, my real Samsung 980 Pro looks good if I switch to this one, it's 100 bad, yes that's already promising, although it says 100 bad sequential read, I want i.e. it's about 1 000. megabytes below the advertised speed, still 2500 megabytes per second seems like a usable size just waiting for the right speed, even the right sequence doesn't look that bad at least with very fast loading we have about 1000 megabytes per second.

I will not perform tests again. in real capacity with the H2 W test and as you can see with an elapsed time of about 41 seconds we are still running at about a gigabyte per second but I expect this to drop dramatically due to the lack of cache which we can already see in this moment. so I'm not really sure what's going to happen time wise, but let's check again, maybe in two or three minutes, after almost 10 minutes, it dropped quite a bit, it's at 180 megabytes per second right now, it's still dropping slowly, but still falling with this speed.

I could still finish this test in about three hours and then I would still have to verify it, let's see how it turns out after maybe an hour, after three hours of traveling to the disk and only achieving 240 gigabytes we have a time remaining of almost a day complete and that's just for the driving part we would still have to verify all this data so just the test itself would take almost two days which I'm not willing to spend and shows what kind of rubbish this trip is in the end. the result was pretty obvious and especially looking at something like this, the 128 terabyte external SSD which is even called Backup Plus, if you are thinking of getting one of these drives especially for backups, it is a very stupid idea because like you, We're going to ruin your data, I guarantee this is something you should never use for any type of similar storage and the same goes for those M2 SSDs and I mean the fun part is this is a SATA drive if I went to the sale on line on AliExpress didn't even say it's a SATA drive, it was listed as 4 terabyte Samsung latest generation m.2 SSD from 2023, 440 euros, which obviously isn't going to make sense because 40 euros for or like 40 dollars for four terabytes It's not going to No matter how you try it, this memory capacity is simply not available for this price and it will like not to be available for a long time, and it's that simple if you're looking for online storage and you see something. it's like I didn't know that a third of the price is probably not legit and it's actually what you have here and even the nvme SSD which looked a little better, you still have to keep in mind that although it worked pretty well at first Look at Crystal disk information, this thing won't contain four terabytes.

I think at best it's a one terabyte SSD and I mean if they

fake

the capacity then you don't know what else is fake and how reliable it will be. I saw that the read and write speeds just stop working drastically after the slightest amount of load because it also doesn't contain any kind of cache so stay away from any kind of drives like this, I mean the data at the end is just very valuable, especially for you as a consumer, if you have your personal data there and it gets lost, it probably wasn't worth saving money on this video, which was a little different because now at least it seems to me like in our scene.

There aren't many interesting things happening, it's also summer and it's very hot here, so I felt like making a different video than usual. I hope you enjoyed it too, enjoy the rest of your Sunday. See you soon, bye, thank you.