Fake Samsung 990 Pro passes basic checks but runs slower than a USB 2.0 drive | Hacker News Reader

Fake Samsung 990 Pro passes basic checks but runs slower than a USB 2.0 drive

tomshardware.com

35 pointsspeckx14 comments

> We've heard countless SSD clone stories over the years, but this particular Samsung 990 Pro 2TB case stands out for the frighteningly sophisticated level of counterfeiting behind its creation. The label usually tells you whether a drive is legitimate. You can spot many telltale signs, such as incorrect model names, misaligned text, or poor print quality, that are more than sufficient to give the imposter away. But not this counterfeit Samsung 990 Pro.

How the heck can someone have the resources to produce or have produced counterfeit drive hardware and firmware but not have the resources to perfectly copy printing?

cuts into the profit

I dunno, that's always bothered me, too.

I don't buy the cost argument. It's a one-time NRE, same as the product itself. You scan the original label once, modify text as required, print a million of them. Job done.

The only explanation I can come up with is that it must be related to why spam emails are so easy to spot. They don't want to fool the guy who knows enough to rigorously test the fake and demand a refund, they want to filter for the people who don't know how to spot a fake from the label because those people are less likely to investigate and try getting a refund.

Though honestly I don't really buy that either. I dunno.

The speed is kind of a red herring. The defining characteristic of fake drives is that they have less than the advertised capacity, but have a hacked firmware that misreports their capacity to the system, and fails when more than the actual capacity is written. So to find out whether a drive is fake, you have to fill it all the way and read the data back.

Counterfeit mainly just means it's pretending to be something that it isn't. It's entirely possible this drive has the advertised capacity (though I wouldn't count on it), but it would still be a fake.

No, it isn't the advertised capacity, because counterfeiting scams require a large ratio between the value of the part claimed and the part provided, and you can't get 2TB of flash memory chips cheaply no matter how slow you're willing to accept. When counterfeit storage devices like this are disassembled, usually they're found to have a small microSD card in them.

Is that actually true for SSDs? I was under the impression that manufacturers have a speed-capacity tradeoff "knob" they can adjust.

Specifically, that each buried gate can store one bit (SLC), two bits (MLC), three bits (TLC) or even more.

Obviously more bits means closer thresholds, making the gate more susceptible to electrical noise when reading and writing (and process variation in the dopant loading).

It's pretty easy to think up ways to pack in more bits that would slow down the read rate... such as applying multi-level ECC or just waiting longer for the read ADCs to settle.

There's a big difference between Samsung's 990 Pro NAND and controller chips (TLC NAND, DRAM acceleration, and a good controller), vs. bottom bin flash storage. It could be used QLC (4-bit per cell) NAND with no DRAM and a much, much worse controller and still have 2TB of space.

For context, actual "real" low-end NVMe drives are 2TB for ~$180. The Samsung is $300 for 2TB right now. I could easily see you cutting cost by using used NAND and horrible controllers and get a cost much lower.

Maybe the slow transfer speeds are part of the cover up. If it takes 6 weeks of constant writing to reach the 64gb of storage limit of the actual chips then no one will ever find out that it's actually a 64gb ssd.

I thought this was only common on fake flash drives and external SSDs? Has this been happening to NVMe SSDs as well? It's definitely possible, but scammers tend to be lazy to branch out beyond what already works, and SSDs are a bit more complex.

Samsung Magician checks the drive to see if it’s genuine, I haven’t heard of any thwarting of that so far and it’s mentioned in the article that it correctly identified the counterfeit. What I do is check Samsung Magician genuine check first, then do its performance test, then use h2testw to fill it and verify that it passes fully. It’s a lot of work but it’s better than ending up with counterfeit stuff!

With prices going up I bet there will be many more counterfeiters now trying to take advantage of this.

I recently bought 3 of these drives, thankfully mine appear to be legit... TFA doesn't say, but I wonder if theirs didn't come in original packaging...

> installed drive is running at PCIe 3.0, even though the Samsung 990 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 SSD.

That's a basic check

As is the speed test

Similar to how the article title passes basic checks, but is false

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