Determining if SSD has been replaced

StoleMyOwnCar

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 30, 2013
Messages
2,981
I found an open box 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus at Microcenter for $240 ($230 with CPU combo bundle price). I couldn't resist that price, so I'm going to try it out. Obviously, I am wary that this is one of those cases where the SSD inside has been replaced with something else.



I have taken some pictures with my camera. I do notice a few spots where it looks odd. Mainly, toward the bottom middle, it looks like there is a chip missing, compared to the stock photos on web sites? I'm not sure if it was just a prototype image. Everything else looks similar enough. I plan to install Samsung Magician and check it with some benchmark software after I get it in, obviously, but I was wanting some other eyes on this. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to check the authenticity. I'm not particularly worried about write amount because these are rated for so many writes to begin with.

Thanks.
 
Looks legitimate to me when compared to other images on the web. Load it up with Samsung Magician, it should tell you pretty quickly if it's genuine or not.

1622515216271.png
 
Thanks. It looks legitimate, and the speeds are fine, but wtf is with this 26 TB written lol? If it's open box, that means they had it for a maximum of 30 days or so. The power on time in Crystaldisk shows about 99 hours. That means they were writing an average of 250GB/hour for about 4.25 days straight? What kind of load does that, exactly?

Anyway the drive benches fine, and it still has manufacturer warranty. Which on this drive, the TB endurance is rated for around 1200 TBW? Since I got it for about $70-80 off, I guess it's a good enough deal? Just... very weird. I guess at least it's been stress tested...

samsung test.PNG


1622527041447.png




Looks legitimate to me when compared to other images on the web. Load it up with Samsung Magician, it should tell you pretty quickly if it's genuine or not.

View attachment 361669
 

Attachments

  • 1622527017762.png
    1622527017762.png
    29.3 KB · Views: 0
Holy shit. Chia maybe? I'm not very familiar with mining/pharming tbh.
 
Holy shit. Chia maybe? I'm not very familiar with mining/pharming tbh.

Me neither. I'm really confused as to what they were using it for. Just pure stress testing? Hardcore database access? And why did they return it afterwards? It reformatted just fine. Windows installed just fine. Windows has been pretty stable. It benches fine. SMART checks out and the health is good. So I'm not sure why they would return it...
 
That definitely sounds like it was used for Chia mining
Thanks for verifying, I don't know much about how hard mining hits SSDs. Well, I'm not sure why they returned it then at this point.

Overall, the write endurance per the Samsung warranty on the 2TB line is 1200TBW, so they used 26/1200=0.02166666666 or 2.17% of the write endurance on the drive. I got it for about 230/310=0.74193548387 or 74.2% of the price, or in other words a 25.8% cost savings. I guess I'm alright with this. At that point it's just a question of whether Samsung would honor their warranty in case stuff hits the fan or not, though I guess it shouldn't considering... well... it's lasted this long through whatever kind of hell Chia is.
 
Ya, probably Chia, as this is what mine looks like after plotting 9-10TB's.


980rpo-writes.jpg
 
Ya, probably Chia, as this is what mine looks like after plotting 9-10TB's.


View attachment 361704
Well... I guess it's good that the previous user didn't decide to do a 9-10tb chunk. Jesus.... My health status still says 100%... I've never actually seen an SSD that wasn't at 100%...

Do you actually have decreased space on that now?
 
Well... I guess it's good that the previous user didn't decide to do a 9-10tb chunk. Jesus.... My health status still says 100%... I've never actually seen an SSD that wasn't at 100%...

Do you actually have decreased space on that now?
Still have 1 TB. I am not sure if you lose usable space. I think it just works till it gets to zero and then the drive switches to read only mode.
 
This is somewhat rambling, but after watching a gamernexus "what to watch out for in a used GPU" and how he mentioned sometimes the little chips on the back of the GPU can be blown off and it still work (but not ideally), I revisited this topic.

Looks like I'm okay though. The issue is that Samsung's stock image doesn't align with the actual product.

1622707078594.png


This is my PCB. I had a hard time finding this, but I found pictures of someone else installing this same SSD. https://david.gardiner.net.au/2021/03/samsung-970-evo-plus.html

At the top they include a stock (ie retail) picture of the device and you'll notice that it looks a bit different in that same area


1622707368472.png



But scroll down on his installed picture (though it's blurry):

1622707529617.png



And yeah that one chip where the arrow is pointing is also missing like on mine and the other pieces are oriented a bit differently. I wonder what it was originally supposed to be.

Well that's all, just a random observation and explanation for why I made this topic in the first place, I did indeed confirm the stock images don't match up to the actual device which is why I got worried in the first place.
 
That model SSD has been around for nearly 2.5 years now and has probably gone though a few design revisions. There may even be variations between different capacities. Minor components added/removed and/or in different places is not an issue unless you're seeing actual signs of damage (e.g., pulled pads/traces, broken solder joints, PCB heat damage due to desoldering).
 
That model SSD has been around for nearly 2.5 years now and has probably gone though a few design revisions. There may even be variations between different capacities. Minor components added/removed and/or in different places is not an issue unless you're seeing actual signs of damage (e.g., pulled pads/traces, broken solder joints, PCB heat damage due to desoldering).

That's fair, I just got a bit paranoid.

I just finished transferring Red Dead Redemption (about 112 gb) from drive A (also an NVME drive) to this drive. The average speed was about 1.5 or so GB/s.



Aren't these temperatures too high? Should I look into getting a heatsink? It promptly lowered back down to 45 or so idle, and it looks like it stays at around 51-52 while gaming, but I'm a bit worried. Maybe I just never looked at my NVME SSD run temperature before.
 
Last edited:
45C idle sounds a little high in my very limited experience but nothing to worry about. A small heatsink would help but really isn't necessary. In my case I definitely had higher temps when I had my video card running 100% when doing some distributed computing projects on it when it was in my old motherboard. The extra heat from the video card made a very noticeable increase in temps when running. My case has quite high positive air pressure and removing some of the expansion card brackets so the heat around the video card could escape lowered temps a bit for the NVME drive.

When replaced with a Gigabyte Aorus x570 Pro Wifi which comes with a couple of NVME heatsinks I used a heatsink with my NVME drive and it dropped temps several more degrees. There's also a bit more airflow around the NVME drive since I moved from a heatsink/fan to an AIO which also helped. Currently the NVME is idling at 29C.

A heatsink for the NVME isn't necessary but won't hurt. If possible, get some airflow around the drive and that should be more than enough.
 
I should probably post this into a pc case section but here's the situation in my case:

The arrows point to air flows, and the red/green circle is the position of the SSD. I have a bit of separation in between it and the GPU, and it does have air directly on it. I also don't have a lid on the case because unfortunately I don't think the two outtakes I have could handle the amount of heat the GPU will pump into a MicroATX box.

IMG_2118.JPG


I would like to move the GPU down a slot to the blue slot, and then move the Sound Blaster card up above it, but I can't. My other NVME SSD would be right under it and I'm kind of scared as to what this thing would do to it temperature wise. It's a cheap Inland 1TB.
IMG_2120.JPG


Again I'll probably go ask in an appropriate section though. Thanks for all of the feedback here. I just really wish the "tempered glass window" crap would die off, because what I would have really preferred to be on the top of the case is a filtered slot for a large fan, not a freaking useless window. I don't sit there and masturbate to my PC enough to appreciate the intricacies of modern design, apparently.
 
This is somewhat rambling, but after watching a gamernexus "what to watch out for in a used GPU" and how he mentioned sometimes the little chips on the back of the GPU can be blown off and it still work (but not ideally), I revisited this topic.

Looks like I'm okay though. The issue is that Samsung's stock image doesn't align with the actual product.

is is my PCB. I had a hard time finding this, but I found pictures of someone else installing this same SSD. https://david.gardiner.net.au/2021/03/samsung-970-evo-plus.html

At the top they include a stock (ie retail) picture of the device and you'll notice that it looks a bit different in that same area




But scroll down on his installed picture (though it's blurry):



And yeah that one chip where the arrow is pointing is also missing like on mine and the other pieces are oriented a bit differently. I wonder what it was originally supposed to be.

Well that's all, just a random observation and explanation for why I made this topic in the first place, I did indeed confirm the stock images don't match up to the actual device which is why I got worried in the first place.
You can't really compare used gpu to used ssd.
 
You can't really compare used gpu to used ssd.

Yes, but they have some similarities. Namely they have a lot of chips and circuit components on a PCB. Hence I thought that it's a possibility that maybe my SSD had a chip missing that would degrade its long term performance but wasn't immediately apparent in short term benchmarking. That's why I wanted to make sure that my board at least matched someone else's brand new one. Which it does, thankfully.
 
The stock heatsinks on my Dark Hero keeps both NVME drives cool.
this one has been plotting 24/7 for almost 2 weeks now and stays around 50-53*C, ambient temp in my bedroom is 85*F.

980-rpo-Chia.jpg



And the PC for reference,
The plotting 980 Pro is in the bottom NVME below the GPU,
IMG_1430.JPEG
 
Last edited:
The stock heatsinks on my Dark Hero keeps both NVME drives cool.
this one has been plotting 24/7 for almost 2 weeks now and stays around 50-53*C, ambient temp in my bedroom is 85*F.

View attachment 363907


And the PC for reference,
The plotting 980 Pro is in the bottom NVME below the GPU,
View attachment 363905
Well unfortunately this motherboard was for the 8700k, and I guess this is before it was common for boards to give you NVME SSD heatsinks that are included on the board. I have noticed that it seems a lot more boards are including them as stock options...
 
Kinda just had something similar happen. Purchased an open box WD SN550 Blue 1TB NVMe drive at a 25% discount, tested it on my USB to M.2 adapter to see what CrystalDisk had to say about it...

"Open box"
1623602590624.png


40TB written in the span of (at the time) 199 power on hours. Holy shit.

By comparison, my oldest NVMe drive has over 8000 power on hours and barely reached 20TB written.
 
Last edited:
Kinda just had something similar happen. Purchased an open box WD SN550 Blue 1TB NVMe drive at a 25% discount, tested it on my USB to M.2 adapter to see what CrystalDisk had to say about it...

"Open box"
View attachment 365729

40TB written in the span of (at the time) 199 power on hours. Holy shit.

By comparison, my oldest NVMe drive has over 8000 power on hours and barely reached 20TB written.
Hmmm... I'm starting to think there's a conspiracy rather than a coincidence, here. Are people deliberately going to several locations and then buying and using and then shortly returning these drives, rather than buying one and wearing it into the ground and basically losing all of their money on it?

Interesting. So it's basically free money, because it's low power, too. The only investment is driving labor.

40TB on a 1TB entry level drive is rough, too. That would be the equivalent of if mine came with over 80TBW. Probably still work fine, but... I think this mining craze is really causing some shady behavior to come up, like this. It shouldn't be long before the retailers notice this trend. Ultimately, they're the ones losing money on it. Actually everyone but the Chia miners are.
 
Last edited:
Chia chews through the SSD's, Chia drive on the left and my OS drive on the right
980-Pro-OS-Chia.jpg


Oh, look, I can still return it, got 10 more days left, should I be a douche and return it?

980-Pro-BB-order.jpg


no, I am not gonna be douche and return it.
 
It's the fact that you can even return them like nothing ever happened that is scary... the thing is none of these shops are probably checking SMART when they get them back. An SSD used for mining is different from a GPU used for mining--its life has literally been reduced. Like 100% verifiably reduced...

This is probably happening in more places than my Microcenter, too...
 
Kinda just had something similar happen. Purchased an open box WD SN550 Blue 1TB NVMe drive at a 25% discount, tested it on my USB to M.2 adapter to see what CrystalDisk had to say about it...

"Open box"
View attachment 365729

40TB written in the span of (at the time) 199 power on hours. Holy shit.

By comparison, my oldest NVMe drive has over 8000 power on hours and barely reached 20TB written.

Yeah I would be pretty angry. My main boot drive (Samsung 960 Pro) that I've used for several years now has almost 17k power-on hours yet less than 20TB written. Of course, I don't use it to mine Chia...

Chia chews through the SSD's, Chia drive on the left and my OS drive on the right
View attachment 365735

Oh, look, I can still return it, got 10 more days left, should I be a douche and return it?

View attachment 365736

no, I am not gonna be douche and return it.

I doubt the return window even matters much. They could literally mine it until it dies then just buy a new one, swap them, and return the broken one.
 
Back
Top