PSA… Counterfeit SSDs being sold on Amazon

M

man114

Weaksauce
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Feb 3, 2020
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These drives are being sold on Amazon, maybe $10-20 cheaper than you can buy a more known brand So not unheard of cheap to suggest it should be a scam. I’ve used these types of drives before to speed up old laptops. Usually these types of drives are just meh drives, cacheless cheap and not terribly fast, much like WD greens. These appear to be an outright fake. I bought 3 and they seem to work initially. Two of them reported a really odd size in drive management, approximately 1000.3gb. The other was a more standard 953.9gb.

when writing to the drive somewhere around 200gb (not even 240gb) the drives fail to write and brick with either a 0 byte raw or are completely unrecognized or show a drive letter with no capacity. I’ve been unable to get one recognized far enough to see if I can recover it to see what the actual size is. The board looks well enough made but the chips are brazed so you can’t tell what they are or who made them. Back label has some interesting “English” the serial numbers were indeed different so they’re not just generic. It’s not just a bad batch either, one shipped direct from the company, the other two from Amazon.

I tried to get them to pull the listing but it’s still available.
 

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ZodaEX said:
How much do they cost?
Click to expand...
They were $60, so roughly a $12 savings off a sale on a low end name brand, though I’ve occasionally seen a WD green go that low. Not a price that should imply an outright fake, usually just a low end dramless drive. The intended use was just to download a bunch of extra games from steam and epic for my daughter so they were readily available. So nothing critical, where even the so so performance of this type of drive is good enough and still better than hdds.

FWIW I buy low end drives like this for similar use cases and it’s usually without issue. I got some Torosus branded 480gb ones a while back and they were dram cached TC Sunbow rebrands and pretty darn good for $32. I also got a Juanwe external 500gb for $35 and it’s exactly what it professes for be, 500gb and fast.

Simply put they weren’t cheap enough to suggest they’d be fakes.
 
Never heard of Inmas, who would make a counterfeit Inmas drive?
came here expecting to see counterfeit Samsung, WD, or other name brand drives.
 
Yeah I think counterfeit is wrong word to use here. They seem like they just be defective. Have you reached out to them for an RMA or support?
 
FlawleZ said:
Yeah I think counterfeit is wrong word to use here. They seem like they just be defective. Have you reached out to them for an RMA or support?
Click to expand...
Counterfeit is the wrong word because they are not a knock off of another SSD. In all likelihood they are fake / scam / fraudulent drives, counterfeit just isn't the right word.

This has been a common scam with flash drives for years now.

Amazon doesn't care. They aren't going to take the time to pull all the drives and see if they are all fake or if these were just a few bad apples. I found out when I posted about my fake Xeon that they don't even track what inventory is provided by what sellers. It just goes in the big Xeon W-3175x bin and they are pulled randomly when sold. If you care about something being genuine, don't order it from Amazon.
 
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I mean, I get that it's a bogus product (not counterfeit, just junk). This does happen on Amazon, especially with SD Cards.

But looking at the brand and the picture, it looks like a piece of crap. Certainly wouldn't buy that over a real brand to save a few bucks.
 
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