*I know this scam may be obvious to some folks but you can never be too careful when it comes to these things. Please do not buy these fake drives and stick with reputable companies for your storage* (Also I do apologize I had to have text in the videos but sellers steal my footage to advertise these scam drives) Hey everyone, welcome back to another installment in my iWish series! I kept seeing these on AliExpress and thought "How bad could these be". Plus I wanted to add to my list of "Fake Drives" I've looked at on the channel. I know I said I wouldn't do another one but these just peaked my interest. If you've come across this video by finding these on AliExpress, I hope you know not to buy them. I hope you enjoyed this rather shorter video from me today. Let me know what you thought of this one down below. TIMESTAMPS: Intro & Disclaimers: 0:00 What I Purchased, Pricing & Red Flags: 1:31 Unboxing both drives: 3:21 The 1TB 990 Pro Drive: 4:31 The 4TB 1080 Pro Drive: 5:36 Connecting the Drives to a PC and Issues: 6:52 Testing the 1TB 990 Pro & Results: 8:41 Testing the 4TB 1080 Pro & Results: 10:25 Conclusion of the Investigation: 11:23 Final Thoughts & Outro: 12:33 Be good people!
Don't have to apologize for the text on the video. I'd much rather you put "This is a scam" than have people see a video talking about the item and buy it.
I understand why the fake USB drives sell, but how many people are actually tech-savvy enough to know and install an M.2 drive, and still fall for this BS?
Unfortunately, there are people who purposely buy such drives, install them to computers and sell them to gullible. For example, install them to laptop, install Win 10, tell to customer you have working computer with 2/4 TB drive. At first glance it looks so, then after some time computer starts crashing, but the seller is already gone.
M.2 drives are easy to install. You remove one screw and slot it in. They're literally the easiest component to install in a PC. No wires, no cables, nothing to get wrong.
@@Boogie_the_cat Lucky for you that you never had to play friends and family tech support. Most normal people don't know what an M-key M.2 slot is, if their device has one and how to open said device.
You can never do enough of these types of videos. A lot channels cover it once or twice, presume you got the message, then go onto something else. I love you come back to it, keeps it fresh in people's memory and shows newer scam products.
They even advertise these fake Samsung SSDs on eBay. So frustrating when you find a good deal on a Samsung SSD and then realize it isn't a Samsung at all.
Maybe sort of unrelated but i used to work for auto auctions and we had a truck with an aftermarket radio that didn't work and they sent me to an audio shop to put a new radio in it and they gave me the broken radio to figure out what to do with it and the top of the radio said "NAMSUNG" in the Samsung font
Not really, I bought plenty of crucial and WD drives (genuine) and even Chinese brands like xraydisk drives.. they all work great, never had any problems with customers about them (I resell them locally)
that controller is likely a realtek RTS5732, they've lasered it off which is pretty common for scammy things so they can't be traced by the manufacturer for using a rejected batch or scamming people
Its not even that, it's a Realtek RayMX RM1135, behind it says "RM1135_DEMO". It's SATA3. The other could be a genuine PCIe controller (RTS5765DL/RTS5762DL) paired with terrible/dying NAND chips.
@@MandrakeFernflower the RM1135 is actually specified as the RTS5735 interchangeably. So the RTS5732 & RTS5735 are both part of the RayMX range. There should just be a tiny difference between the two.
@@Erebus-PCFX They likely used "discarded" quality control failures. the Micron (to most people known as Crucial) chip on one of them at 6:36 in the video appears to be genuine, and the BGA marking NW955 decodes to a 1 Terabit (128GB) chip on the official site
@@Knaeckebrotsaege It could be recycled Flash packages from dead electronics too. The Chinese do that all the time for low-spec/low-price electronics (eg: the C602 chipsets of those cheap socket 2011 Xeon motherboards)
I see soooo many of them on the used market over here in Germany, some with sellers straight up pretending it to be Samsung, others just hinting at it without mentioning the brand. And always a bit cheaper than the real deal but not all that much, and some ridiculous explanation as to why they're selling this "awesome" SSD lol. It's just as bad as the slew of fake USB SSDs. And the worst part is, the people managing the takedowns on the platforms here in Germany don't seem to have any clue about the topic, cause all the fake offers stay up no matter how many times you report them as fake/counterfeit Edit: there's also a whole bunch of 2.5" SATA fake Samsung SSDs, sometimes without samsung branding, sometimes with butchered branding (Sumsang etc)
First SSD: Realtek RayMX RM1135, SATA 3.0 only; (terrible controller, even for SATA speeds) Second SSD: Probably a Realtek RTS5765DL or RTS5762DL PCIe 3.0 x4; (bottom of the barrel PCIe 3.0 controller) The NAND Flash is either YMTC rejected chips or random recycled chips from dead SSDs, it should be why the speed is so low, those are dying/dead.
RAM is actually good from aliexpress, I haven't really seen any sticks that were fake, they are pretty cheap and work fine with specs as in description.
It is fine if you actually search for real products. And it's quite easy tbh. Just don't search for first brand super good price deals. SSD of chinese brands are decent, I use a couple of them
CPUs are also generally decent, normally you save a small amount compared to retail stores. The main caveat is that you don't have any warranty and you won't have a stock cooler, as you only get the CPU in the plastic tray.
Those types of people annoy me a bit. It's already known that scammers are going to scam hard and it's going to make matters worse if they encourage them to buy these scummy products.
Thank you very much for your effort. I would like to say that Lazada which operates in the Far East are a subsidiary company of Alibaba group. They also sell a lot (a lot) of fake electronics. They use the same ways to cheat on customers.
The other problem with these fake drives is malware as well. People will still buy them though because they see a bargain and can't wait to buy them with out doing any research!
I would also stay way from buying SSD from Amazon, with sellers you don't know if you are getting good drives or counterfeits. I bought a SSD recently from them and it did not come in a retail package, but luckily the return process went fine.
Addendum to my Fruugo comment. I have learned elsewhere that sellers are afraid of any PayPal chargeback against them succeeding. Apparently there are compliance points to be lost and penalties applied with a loss of reputation. This might apply with bank chargebacks too - banks may see chargebacks as damaging to their own reputations and might impose restrictions or costs upon account holders proven to be dodgy and may even close accounts. They take chargeback seriously and act on them. Soooo - never be afraid to persue a LEGITIMATE AND PROVABLE chargeback with a bank or PayPal as they are institutions operating under strict laws and oversight themselves. They will not tolerate dodgy dealing on their platforms.
I’ve had a 250 GB Samsung SSD for 10 years now, definitely pays to get good stuff. Mostly just use the laptop for web and word processing so don’t need much space even to this day.
Thanks, was curious about these. I knew these couldn't possibly be real especially as prominent features of the samsung labels were missing, but a new crop of 870 SATA SSDs have started appearing and i was wondering about those, the simple labeling on them meant they didn't have to change anything. And this video reminded me about these 980's and the 870's wouldn't be any more legit than those.
I bought a couple of the Aliexpress scam 990 4tb drives a year ago, neither worked at all upon installing them, neither seller gave me a refund. I lost about $120AUD for nothing.
4:28 Last time I got such a cheapo screwdriver with something it broke while tightening the 4 screws that were installed on the product. 3 of 4 screws done, final one - pling! ^^ I bet that notebook is a war hero, saving its owner from a grenade explosion or a bullet. And it is even working after that.
I bought that same exact ssd you had on the laptop and the same exact thing happened to it a couple years back. I was stumped at how they were able to do this. The part that it actually worked and function as an ssd was shocking at how far china has gone to scam us haha
The NMVe SSD would likely be faster plugged into a machine directly. All the DRAMless SSDs I've seen in a while use Host Memory Buffer to cache their translation table, which won't work on USB adapters
6:36 Micron (to most people known by their consumer arm "Crucial") has a NAND package marking decoder. Punching in NW955 from the second line yields "MT29F1T08EEHBFJ4-T" which is a 1 Terabit (aka 128GB) NAND flash chip (bits divided by 8 = bytes)
buy 4 and de-solider then and put all 4 chips on 1 for 500gb m.2 and 3 spare bodies if the bodies fail !!! still cheaper than buy a real 500gb maybe. but you get spare parts if need be !!!
Cheers Smuz, I do find things like this interesting. Scammers will scam and these selling platforms really dodo enough to ensure that the products sold on their site are real. I don't buy from them anyway. Although a lot of I know have purchased stuff from these sites without issues. But they haven't bought any tech. I can see that some people would buy either of these modules to use in ipod modding. So reviews like this are needed. BTW was watching a video by a guy looking at Walmart Iphones and he had plasters on both thumbs. ( different styles to those you use). You've set up a trend. 😂
These are getting more convincing! I got my 970 Pro from my local game store :p the drive was cheaper in the game store than in the actual pc shop . . .
9:00 that's the partition alignment. has nothing to do with the drive capacity. this number will show up red (and with a big fat BAD) if the partition alignment is screwed up (from cloning a HDD to a SSD with a crappy tool) which would lead to NAND writes more than doubling for every write operation you do, ie degrading performance and wearing out the NAND *much* faster. obviously not a factor on junk like his, but on a real 990 Pro you'd hardly notice a performance difference, but meanwhile the SSD does a NAND killing speedrun in the background
I think the NAND on the second one is a Micron part that they've tried, rather poorly, to scrub the markings from. It seems to say NW955, which corresponds to MT29F1T08EEHBFJ4-T:B, a 1Tbit (128GB) TLC flash.
I guessed 120Gb and they are, but that's an easy guess, as nowadays nobody manufactures the kind of flash chips an SSD controller uses in capacities below 120. In this case they can't cheat and use flash chips designed for USB drives... ...unless you design an M2 card with an USB host controller, an usb flash controller and a cheap 32Gb flash module, also having 3 chips in it will look as if the fake M2 SSD has a DRAM cache!, and this solution should be even cheaper than using a SSD controller and SSD flash modules. The scam manufacturers need to step their game if even I can come with better fake products on a RU-vid comment.
Samsung and other brands are changing their design very often. People who don't get themselves updated would not even know those fake SSDs look like actual Samsung stuff. And those who are savy just skip those when they see them.
The fact that they still are trying to scam people with shit like this makes me sad. Sometimes people just want to cheap out without knowing about these scams and then they get a expensive flash drive that will just corrupt and delete their data and they probably won't even know about it.
Well over seas this happens a lot, however you would think in the USA and sites like Amazon would be safe to buy and it's not, fake MVMe's. video cards, mics, webcams and the list goes on. The sellers will drag their feet along killing "Return Time" offering replacements and spam you till the refund window expires! it's really sad
hey smoorez! there's a cool chinese phone i think you should have a look at, it's an iphone se 1st gen clone, released before the se was even announced. funny thing is, it's an actual iphone 5s, just in a custom smaller iphone 6-esque housing, i think it would be worth taking a look at if you could find it!
It's a DRAM-less QLC turd of an SSD that screeches to a halt (80MB/s) as soon as the pSLC cache runs out. As a secondary SSD as a pure storage drive or steam game library dump, it *might* be ok. Using it as your main drive with the OS installed? hell no
smoorez i think the nand on that second fake ssd was actually a micron chip... i seen the m on it which is the logo micron uses... i still wouldnt trust them though! 1 cuz fake capacity n 2 they slower than a ide hard drive from 2002..
I got a fake Samsung SSD from one supposedly "safe" retailer here and it was so bad, not even 1gb/s read and write speed, the font was off and I'm pretty sure my laptop got 50 viruses just from plugging it in. After i took it out the writing on the sticker just... Smudged when I put my finger on it probably from the heat. The only thing that looked okay was the white plastic thing? (Idk the name) Inside the box, no it didn't come with any documentation and the app said it's counterfeit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I'm glad i took pictures of everything cause it was just too funny not to.
I bought a Kinspec SSD M.2 drive from AliExpress over a year ago for just over £41, I did all the tests that where performed on this video on it before cloning and swapping out the original laptop storage. I got the same speeds as the original crucial drive and haven't had any problems with it. I do agree with you that there are some dubious ones out there but I can't complain about Kingspec. Just a wee heads up if you're new drive is not recognised by your PC and you have a M.2 usb enclosure with USB C connection, plug it into an android device and format it, then connect back to the PC and it will be recognised. I've had this problem with SSD and m.2 drives from big named manufacturers and it works.
I'm confused by something... why do you have the disclaimer at the bottom? Won't the scammers just zoom in on the video to "edit" the disclaimer out or are they too lazy for that?
If they zoom it in then the footage won't be as usable. They can go the extra mile though to take whatever they need but there's not too much more I can do.
these are all over Ebay Germany, if you report them to Ebay, nothing will happen to the sellers as Ebay doesnt find an Issue with the drives. Please report them anyways
you beat me to it I was going to make a video on these fake ones and the fake WD ones as well.. Guess I'll just make a video on fake Mic's and cams lol
You're funny (you actually made me laugh when you said that), you don't need to sabotage these drives to return them, they're already sabotaged 😆 Send them a link to your video, showing there is only one chip and the chip type along with your test results and tell them they're dirty scammers and they should be ashamed to sell this, and you want your money back, they won't argue 😉
Why is it that they can never, ever, get the printing righ with these fakest? It always looks just a little off, just a little fuzzy, just a little wrong.
Be careful as Billion Reservior AFAIK may use defective nand chips, so it may work fine for a few months, just don't expect it to last a long time and back up your data.
Well, do not buy something that is 3 or 4 times too good to be true 😁 Als,o check the store, customer reviews , how long they are operating on certain platform etc ...
I bought FAKE Samsung SSD 4TB from EBay but they sent me 2TB and it's not working properly when you try to copy data it's disconnect and reconnect again, avoiding to by this you will regret they are thieves and they rejected exchange or refund.
