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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011) or Samsung (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that.

Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.

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Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money. Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.

How do you spot the fake listings?

These ones are fairly obvious as though they adopt the same model name and colouring than the original, they do not show a Samsung or WD brand. I suspect they do that to avoid giving standing to these companies to sue them. If the distributor (ebay) doesn't care, and the buyers are individuals who will not sue, they act pretty much with impunity.

The lowest hanging fruit are the ones with too good to be true prices.

Is there some software to give these drives a test drive, before putting them in use?

Reply to self, another post below mentions this software:

https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...

Unfortunately the only way I know is destructive, ie attempt a full disk write.

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