I wonder how much it costs without the fake Samsung sticker. I'm always almost on the market for cheap, good SSDs...
Yeah, it sounds like this Maxio controller is quite decent and it's cheap because they don't have name recognition yet. The Acer FA200 appears to be a non-counterfeit SSD using the same controller. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/acer-fa200-4...
I mean... it's visibly different, you don't need to look at the controllers to see the difference.
Sure, the differences are easy to spot when a real one is next to it. I doubt I would be able to identify this fake by itself. (I work in ewaste recycling, and look at lots of NVME drives every day.)
And don't manufactures release different versions under the same brand name? How big can the difference be between authentic drives?