Fake Samsung 980 PRO SSDs show up in the Asian PC market

It looks like fake Samsung SSDs are getting sold in the Asian PC market

News of counterfeit Samsung 980 PRO SSDs have started to appear on social media, with scammers re-badging and firmware updating cheaper M.2 storage devices to appear as more expensive Samsung models. 

Samsung’s 980 PRO SSD is easily one of the most popular M.2 SSDs on the market, being popular amongst both PC builders/enthusiasts and PlayStation 5 upgraders. This makes Samsung’s 980 PRO a target for scammers, and it now looks like some PC sellers are now building PCs with fake Samsung 980 PRO SSDs in an effort to generate higher profits from their customers. 

In this article, we have included images from a Baidu forum post that showcases a user’s pre-built system that contained what the buyer though was a Samsung 980 PRO SSD. This SSD turned out to be a counterfeit drive, an SSD that offers significantly lower performance levels than an official Samsung drive.

Yep, that isn’t a Samsung 980 PRO  

In the benchmarks below, the owner’s fake Samsung 980 PRO SSD couldn’t get their SSD to achieve sequential write speeds that are much higher than 4.8 GB/s in SSD benchmarks, which is a far cry from Samsung’s 980 PRO’s 7 GB/s rated sequential read speeds. 

It turns out that this user’s Samsung 980 PRO SSD is in fact an SSD that uses a Maxio branded SSD controller, a DRAM-less SSD controller from a Chinese manufacturer. Samsung’s SSDs utilise Samsung’s own NAND and SSD controllers, making this SSD an obvious fake.  

Without benchmarking or removing the stickers on these fake Samsung SSDs, it may not be obvious to purchasers that they had acquired a system with a fake Samsung SSD. This allows scammers to get away with selling systems with counterfeit SSDs.

If you purchase PCs from trusted retailers, you will not be at risk of purchasing a system with counterfeit components.  

You can join the discussion on the fake Samsung 980 PRO SSDs being sold to Asian consumers on the OC3D Forums.