I just got a 4tb wd ssd off of newegg for quite cheap it was promoted by newegg in their black friday promotion i was hesitant to purchase it but it was promoted by newegg.... of course after i pay the bill this video comes out ill let you know if it passes the tests. It was perfectly recognized by the wd software
@@PapaMav it was from a third party seller but promoted by newegg on the black friday specials it was wd 4tb blue for 250ish. Anyhow i ran the program he said and it detected as full size as far as i can tell
since Samsung spinpoint died; WD hard drives have been my go to. Even with their scummy NAS antics; they don't just drop dead after 2-3 years like every Seagate I've bought... However never was a fan of their SSDs. Even Toshiba are tenured market hardened SSD experts compared to WD.
@@anasevi9456 I've had a bunch of Seagates that have lasted years. I still use 3 Seagate HDD's that I got for my Dimension E520 more than 15 years ago, and they still work fine. I haven't had a single one die. I've gone through 3 WD HDD's in that time.
@@twizz420 between my nas and computers I probably own like 15 hard drives, 8 of them Wd, 5 seagates and the rest hitachi. One of the seagates failed and another is noisy and starting to show some SMART errors, albeit not important ones, but I still don't trust it. No problems from the rest, I got a wd green that's 15yo and 0 errors. All in all in the 3.5 inch I'd say seagate is just slightly below in reliability but could be put on bad luck or bad batches so I'd say it's hit and miss. Butt for 2.5 hdd the seagates are to be avoided like the plague. I did an internship at a computer repair shop (now work in IT service of an education related company) and everyday I'd swap laptop drives and 95% of the time it was dead seagates.
The "too cheap to be true" fake USB drives have always come with some form of hacked firmware to report as a way higher capacity than they really are. They will either fill and go no further, or will continuously overwrite itself.
As always, it's people's innate greed that makes them unable to resist a scam. When the price sounds too good to be true, and if you compare it with other drives of the same size on the same site it costs a lot less, and it has little to no reviews and/or the reviews are all 5 stars, those are all warning klaxons that you shouldn't ignore. A few weeks ago I bought a 256GB Samsung Bar USB stick because I have one of their 64GB models that has held up well for years, they are nice and small so they don't block adjacent ports, they are made of metal so are very tough, and even have a built in part to fit on a keyring if you want. Write speeds are USB2.0 class, but read speeds are USB3.0, and they don't lie about it. Anyways, the 256GB was on sale for like $28 at Newegg so I bought one and it's the same high quality as the old 64GB one. Then about a week later Newegg had some no-name 1TB metal USB stick for like $25-30. They didn't have any reviews yet, but of course it sold out because people are stupid and greedy. It should be long enough now that I need to go back and look up that drive to see how many buyers will be whinging about how it was a total rip-off.....
Great job informing people about this SSD scam. It's the same exact scam we see all over Amazon and eBay and other sites for years when it came to those super large flash drives that were super cheap! Heck they're still doing it! They're just doing it now to SSDs.
Thanks for info on that software , i ordered portable 4TB SSD from Ali express for only 10$ during black Friday was 64% off ,now I can test properly when it comes ;)
I do think, as you mentioned Bryan, that these scammers do ruin it for newcomers to the scene of M.2 drives with many people not considering them as all will treated as fake by many consumers 😵😢. We need competition to keep prices down ☺🥰👍
We appreciate you doing what you can to educate people in the market for parts where this sort of scam is a problem! I know when my wife and I bought our 480GB SSD's almost 2 years ago, they were around $45 and now there are legit SATA 1TB drives in the $48-$52 range from TeamGroup, TimeTec, and SP and others. So seeing something for 2/3 that price isn't as much of a red flag to a buyer, but as you showed above, it's something that one needs to watch out for. RMprepUSB looks to be quite useful if someone wanted to be absolutely certain before using a drive of questionable integrity. Too bad we can't have a nice DRAM cache nVME 1TB m.2 drive for around $75-80, seems those are almost all $100 and up. Gen 4 like a 980 Pro even like $130 or more.
@@username8644 I do try to opt for nicer when possible, but keep in mind not everyone spends that much. Yes spent more on my old Titan Xp collectors edition than $1200, and typically I prefer 4x GPU setups, but most people aren't running sub-zero phase cooled computers for daily use (or even liquid nitrogen for overclocking, though I mean I'm a bit of an exception). I still find the cheaper ones useful for laptops since SATA protocol is already snail speeds, so why would I spend way more than I need to for a SATA drive? Even the 2TB TeamGroup NVME I've got running in this machine right now was only like $140 (which is less than I spent on the 1TB Corsair drive in my gaming laptop, but if I want more speed on my desktop I'll just do a multi-tier raid since I have a Threadripper and that's going to get more speed than a drive that maxes out x4 PCIEgen3) Like my Linux laptop, it has like a 240 GB drive that's like $20 from 3 years ago or something, it works fine. Now with similar drives costing $50-$60 for legitimate 1 TB you have to understand most people aren't doing much more than checking their email and browsing the web, only a few of us have 2x 1300 PSUs in our daily machines, have our 3x 4k monitor setup, run virtual machines for multiple OS's at once, run AI generation grograms or CFD analysis. I do all those, but even still, some of my machines I can't tell the difference between PCIe 3.0 maxed out speeds and about 2 GB/s read/write from cheaper drives (their pitiful Intel CPUs just are not fast enough to notice, or they are running Linux and then even a potato feels like a rocket ship). For 99% of the population though, they can't tell the difference in speed, and I bet your still bottlenecked somewhere else like your OS or your program itself, and most people just browsing the web for 95+% of the time.
The cheapest safe option I found (in EU) are 256gb NVME pulled from OEM systems on Ebay sold as new. I got one for 17€ (now they raised a bit in price to 20€), it's a WD SN530 under HP. Generally these are from professional sellers, mostly with Premium badge and more often than not from your own country. On CrystalDiskInfo shown less than 1 hour power on hours. I know it's not the newest and fastest drive, and definitely not a great capacity, but for a budget boot drive I think they are more than enough and are from known brands. Also saw 1TB Sata brand SSD going for 60€ on Amazon from times to times.
Thanks for the video. My drive is similar on photos to your 980 and is already on the way as I bought it earlier. Now I know how to check if it's fake or not when it arrives.
Awesome video as always - Had the experience of fake spaced MicroSD cards that started corrupting data. Not fun to get these- FAKE TEST before you do ANYTHING!
Two and a half years before, my sister bought a "Scandisk 256 Gb microSD Card" for her smartphone from AliExpress because sometimes those are cheaper than tech stores here in Mexico. First 3 weeks, it works with no problems but after a month... Messages like "There is a problem with your storage sd card, please check", missing photos, corrupted files, random crashed system apps and sometimes pc did not recognize it. Fortunately, she had backups in Google Photos and Drive so she bought another Scandisk microsd card in a local tech store, paying a bit more and until today no problems, errors or crashes. Please, be careful with those "offers" or cheaper prices before you click "Add to cart".
If they only just had a smaller capacity than advertised it would not be nearly as bad. But that is not the reason why your system did not boot up anymore. The problem is far far worse: The controller will act as if the drive really had that capacity and if you write new files to it you WILL be able to write to the drive and will be able to see those new files. So what is the problem? It just writes to the same storage over and over again - overwriting everything that was there before. In your case as it was the system-drive you were simply deleting your OS by downloading more stuff.
Hey, i notice you where looking for soft that can actualy give you a read out on the size of the disk, the utilitary called "H2testw" can give you that without spitting errors on errors , it can take times (depending on the size of the spoofed drive) but at the end you will get the answers you needed . Get well !
This isn't exactly new scam, but it just has been harder to recreate this with nvme. This very same method has been used with USB sticks, external HDD's and external SSD's. It just loops through first few gigs or just firmware says it's 1TB while it actually is 60G or some such. Easier to pull of with closed enclosures where as nvme is very open so you cannot use cheap microSD's to cheat.
I got a 2tb one from Amazon for 90 USD and I did the tests with fakedisk the same program you used in the video and it didn't give errors it was 1.86tb.
Thanks for the Video, i saw these on ebay yesterday and there's HEAPS of them for sale and thought i'd google Fake SSDs and your video came up, there's some massive size external drives cheap too that would also be fake no doubt. i hope this video can go viral on Facebook etc.
Thank you for highlighting this, and pointing to a good program to test the drives. I purchased a few of these drives here in Australia and will be testing them all and most likely pursuing a refund through eBay.
The thing is many times the sellers themselves get scammed. I personally know a entrepreneur who bought 100 gpu's (1050ti) from china during the mining craze to sell the cards in budget gaming builds, but he received gts 450/560 cards which just had 1050ti heatsinks and fans. And the worst part is it was only after 40+ builds sold that he came to know this when I purchased one for myself. He was devastated to say the least.
So he built and sold 40 'gaming' computers without doing any kind of significant performance testing, after sourcing cheap GPUs from China during a shortage...
Just a heads up: Office Depot has their 1TB Sandisk SSD's on sale for $79.99 until 12-3-22. Yea, $32 would raise a BIG red flag for me! If it's too good to be true, it probably is!
Personally, I wouldn't bother with a dedicated test program. I'd just take a large video file (30+ GB), make a script that copies the file to the new drive as "1.mp4", "2.mp4", "3.mp4" etc, as many times as there's supposed to be space. Then I'd take a smaller video file (≈3 GB) and copy it to fill the drive further. After that, I'd seek through all the copies to see if they all play back correctly.
I have seen many customer review with photo of the label side and the very same serial number on the one I have is displayed. On another site I see the same label, but this time is on the back of a SAMSUNG SSD case.
Just got in one of those 2TB SSD drives. RMPREP shows the same error. What does,did it cost to ship back to Chyna? 2 days after ordering one person reported those 2TB drive to be fake. All other orders where 500GB ones. People just don't test or do not know how to test. The seller replied: Please do not use irregular software to test the hard disk and second: Dear, this may be caused by poor connection. It is recommended to replace the cable and adapter or try it on other devices. Thank you
Aliexpress did not accept evidence that I provided that the SSD drive is counterfeit - convenient. Aliexpress harboring counterfeit sellers! Yeah, I got my money back and the seller continue selling fakes and make money. Customers will lose data sooner or later.
It is no longer about 'you get what you pay for' but who you pay to. Made a purchase today: 2TB ssd external and a couple of usbs. Kingston. Drectly from Kingston. No Scamazon, no ebay, no Aliexpress. Directly from the company.
just buy good branded ssd from retail shops or amazon, they are not that expensive now. just get 256gb if you don't have budget and add a hard drive for basic storage
Hey I love your videos been watching here since 2017, recently I have been flipping used PCs on my area, I came across this cheap Ryzen 3 3200g PC where the seller said it does not POST, I thought it was simply caused by other components, tried swapping it out the motherboard, ram, etc. But it still won't POST, have you come across with this issue before? If so, is there anything you did to revive a Ryzen processor?
Vaseky is the first ssd I've bought that was unknown to me. It was $60 MLC 1TB, for MLC. I was skeptical. And WD were 55 TLC. $38 for a 1TB is just too good to be true. Thanks for sharing.
What do you mean they NOW appear as fake drives? The overstated capacity in windows/diskmgmt is not new at all and has been an issue for quite a while. Originally started on SD cards years ago. This is not new at all 😂
I bought similar SSD 4 TB for 30 USD from AliExpress. The OS acknowledge the drive for 3.7TB, but ever since you copy and paste file into the new disk, it start acting weird and stop at certain point. I returned the disk to the AliExpress and waiting for the refund.
I ordered this 2TB cheap SSD one, should i use it? If yes, for what purpose, gaming, file storage,.....etc? I ordered it to be either as a back storage or just a drive for files transfer between computers, i won't use it as a main drive for OS or gaming at all, but is it safe for storage anyway.
I just bought a Samsung 4TB SSD off Amazon couple of days ago. Once I installed it I opened up Samsung Magician software which tells you if it is genuine or not and low and behold it said it wasn't. What I want to know is how do these people get away with selling them on Amazon? There is no way to see if it is fake or not, if I did not know about the software I would probably have kept it but I sent it back.
what do you think about Netac? they have some drives for cheap, nvme gen 4, 2 tb with dram for like $ 129. at that price you can buy a much better and reliable unit, like the 980 pro by samsung. but 2tb with dram for $ 129...
if time passed and you can`t return them, don`t throw them away, you can still use them in older laptops: see what is the real capacity, let`s say 120gigs, delete all partitions on it and create only one partition with windows manager of 119 gigs, let all the "remaining" space unallocated and there you go, you have an ok ssd for system or something else
I tried to warn Amazon about these drives but the CS person I was talking to defended the fake drives as real ones. I finally just left feedback on the drive being advertised. No way it was real. $30 for a 2tb ssd.
I have a Asus Prime b550-PLUS which Asus replaced with another. Both have the same problem. It boots up to the home screen, never gives you the chance to hit del or F2 to get into the bios. The CPU is 7 3700x. I have several Asus MBs, this is the first problem I've had.
For people around a MicroCenter in the US, 1TB drives are about $50 right now and you can just walk in the store and get one. I'm using one of their NVMe that cost double that at the time and it's been working fantastic for years. Not the fastest out there but not a slouch with its Phison controller and Toshiba memory (at least on my specific one, they change OEMs sometimes). I actually swear by their house-brand SSD and flash memory as I buy the stuff constantly and nothing has failed me yet. EDIT: I did just now notice the $50 drives are QLC and I've only ever aimed for TLC memory drives, which they're selling for more money. On that note I hope it holds up as well as all these other drives around here cuz I'm 'bout to try some.
how is this test program effective? how would you know those errors are indicating a fake drive? just appears to be a program error. weird program design if you ask me.
Longest lasting drive I ever owned was a KingDian 256GB, first as an external SSD for an OG Xbox One, then One X, and finally into my first PC Build as a backup drive. Now its in a cheap build done for a mate's kid and still going strong, must be 8 or 9 years old at this point and never failed. Lately whenever there's a sale its Crucial, Kingston or Kioxia 1TB Gen 3 drives for £55-65, great for cheap clean builds
Actually if you're on Amazon Prime you can get 1TB drives pretty cheap. Teamgroup's 1TB drive sometimes goes for around $60 or less if there is a Prime day sale.
Oh man, it took them longer than i thought to do this. I remember getting screwed on a USB thumb drive some years ago. Same thing they flash firmware for a bigger drive on them. Only with the SD/USB devices they even rip off other brands.
They've been pulling this scam with SD cards for literally years. This is the same program that I used to prove that some SD cards I bought were fakes. I think that Acclamator is going to get sued by AC-Delco.
I purchased one a few weeks ago to test. It managed about 100gb before it ran out of space once it ran out of space it bricked itself. I assume once all the memory was taken up it somehow didn't have enough space left to fool the drive. Anyone who has bought one make sure you file your dispute with AliExpress as the seller will likely try and get you to cancel the dispute and jump through hoops testing rather than payout
dammmmm, I just bought one of these from ebay for £35. I thought I got a bargain. I have installed windows on it but have not tried to fill it yet. There is no brand name, just a glossy printed label saying 'Red SATA SSD 1TB' I bought it about a month ago so it will be too late to raise a complaint. gutted, but thanks for the info.
i buy one from aliexpress. 1tb 2.5”. yes its around 30+ usd. i was only relying on feedbacks. thankfully it works as intended. i only ever did speed test and its more or less the same with other ssd. but i didnt run rmprep cos i dnt know about it. already install os on that drive and move games. so far 500~ gb left. no problem for these past 2 months so far.
I didn't risk getting a 2TB SATA SSD even on known stores around my area, I got it directly from Samsung and its a bit more expensive but if the less chance I'm getting a ripoff (imagine getting a bootleg 2TB from the official Samsung Store). Since I looked it up before especially the QVO series where you can actually get convincing fakes ones. But yeah it would be nice to know which noname brands to trust since in some regions some stores are still living in La-La Land.
I just bought (and received) a usb-c external drive labelled as '128 TB' from Ali, for about €50 ; sure, I knew it's fake but I was just curious what the heck would be inside the case; doing a 20TB copy now, already getting errors; I of course didn't use it as the OS drive, just usb extra storage...
I hear that f3 can also identify fake drives - great for Linux and Mac users who for some reason are unable to use Windows. (Plug "f3 linux" into your favorite search engine.)
Yeah, Im good with the GPU's I have, I bought a 6800xt for way to much.... But I ended up picking up a Evga ftw3 3080ti for $300 usd, and it just has a flacky display port, it works, but any monitor plugged into that port will flicker or show some sort of corruption until you like hold it up, so I think whoever had it had their cord maybe managed to tight, The other ports work fine, not even a big deal. I sold my 6800xt to my brother, That card performs nearly as well as my 3080ti its impressive, just no ray tracing and no DLSS, and its only limited to FSR, Where Nvidia, DLSS and FSR works on it, so I took the nvidia route for that alone, plus with a mild OC the 3080ti does end up being faster.
or you can just boot linux from USB, write zeroes into file on disk and see at what capacity you hit the message "no space left on device". Non destructive, just one big file. dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zerofile bs=1M, when it fails do rm /tmp/zerofile As a bonus it refreshes those nand cells once.
As you show, there are some legitimate SSDs/SDs that are cheap and real, however, you do need to remember that NAND is binned just like any other silicon. I have a no-name (Heoriady) dram-less 1tb SSD that I bought a long time ago with an SM controller and SanDisk NAND. It's still working great, performance is better than most. I just don't use it for anything critical.
I agree, but the binning part it usually doesn't matter, you can't really forge something as advanced as nand chips so they will definitely from big companies like sandisk etc. Knowing the controller and nand there's no reason stability can be affected. Even some of the new hacky realtek controller + refurbished UFS phone storage ssd's aren't bad since phones usually don't get intensive writes. Ironically all the ssd's that dies on me are brand name stuff for some reason but that's a different sample size.
Wow. Definitely nobody else has made this video. Thank god we have Brian to tell us all that there are scams on the internet. I almost didn't believe it the first 8 times.
Its like those fake SD cards where it says its really big (idk 128/256gb) that were super cheap, and would be like 8-16gb. After that space runs out, instead of crapping out like this SSD, they just start rewriting the data, so it seems like it can hold a lot of GB. Think Bryan even had a vid on those as well. Edit: Okay, 5 sec after posting this he mentioned those as well lol
The same happened to me with a micro sd card I put it my phone thinking that it was 64gig but in actual fact it was about 8gig and when it got full I lost all my data including pictures after family that I'll never get back.
You should make one video about good and cheap SSD Brands you recommend, I have bought a few good SSD's from aliexpress but I'm looking to buy a new m.2 one.
You shouldn't bill this as anything new. Flash-memory-based drives that appear as their faked sizes (which overwrite themselves when their real capacities are exceeded), have existed for OVER 10 years now. All it takes is a bootleg firmware job to do this.
Excellent video, thanks. I recently bought an Ali Express 1 Tb SSD, crazy price, about 25% of normal price. £8 delivered to UK. As you say, properties said 1 TB Tried formatting in FAT and NFTS and both times when I'm trying to copy music and videos to it it craps out and 60 gb. Tried CHKDSK and scan disk for errors in Win 10. They say fixed. I'm just running RMPrep and it has frozen at 95% complete. Any idea what I should now please?
Classic fake symptom. Probably first 95% was writing fast to non-existent flash memory, but remaining 5% is writing to real memory and it may be very slow or getting errors and retrying under Windows which is very slow.
you don't need any programs to test just copy 1 TB or whatever the max storage is and see if it can copy . Sometime it'll say not enough momories or it'll just over ride the data over and over again .
I just like the Acclamator logo looking precisely like an ACDelco auto parts logo. Wonder how they get away with it, but if their m.2 drives work, they are CHEAP on Amazon Prime right now.
I was recently in the market for a 128GB microsd card. I saw some good deals on Amazon and Newegg, but decided it was safer to purchase direct from WD instead.
You would think that amazon would have bots to detect things like this "6TB External Hard Drive,Portable Solid State Data Storage Hard Drives,Small Computer Backup Drive with USB 3.0 to Type-C Support for PC Desktops Laptop Compatible with XS Windows(Blue) Brand: Rouper £59.99
I noticed on the SSD M.2 starting the timeline of this video starting 2:01 to around 2:10 where doing a test for each SSD M.2 (for example to see whether 1TB SSD for cheaper is real or not), it wasn't secure to the motherboard by screwing in. Because I thought that would it dislodged if let's said that you accidentally bump into your PC or SSD M.2. That's where it led to my question would be, when I wanted to test out each SSD M.2, should I secure it by screwing in just to be safe to the motherboard before began testing the SSD M.2?
I had a Lenovo Y410p, it does have a M.2 slot, but only up to 2242 w/l. I tested a 2280 SSD, with it sticking out and it pretty much works. However, I didn't stick with it too long, I simply wanted to know if it is SATA only, or PCIE only or accepts both or it is for WIFI slot.
As monetary conditions and the economy become tougher so will scammers unfortunately, so be on alert
I just got a 4tb wd ssd off of newegg for quite cheap it was promoted by newegg in their black friday promotion i was hesitant to purchase it but it was promoted by newegg.... of course after i pay the bill this video comes out ill let you know if it passes the tests. It was perfectly recognized by the wd software
See my post about Black Friday price meddling, have you seen that sort of thing?
@@kommandokodiak6025 I doubt very much that it won't.
do you have links for the cheapest legit drives?
@@PapaMav it was from a third party seller but promoted by newegg on the black friday specials it was wd 4tb blue for 250ish. Anyhow i ran the program he said and it detected as full size as far as i can tell
My first red flag was it's unbranded and they're made to look like western digital ssds
Or has some official-like branded logo, but the logo is not written correctly (such as SAMSVNG, TOSHI8A, CRVCIAL, etc.)
@@sihamhamda47 Yeah 🦧
since Samsung spinpoint died; WD hard drives have been my go to. Even with their scummy NAS antics; they don't just drop dead after 2-3 years like every Seagate I've bought... However never was a fan of their SSDs. Even Toshiba are tenured market hardened SSD experts compared to WD.
@@anasevi9456 I've had a bunch of Seagates that have lasted years. I still use 3 Seagate HDD's that I got for my Dimension E520 more than 15 years ago, and they still work fine. I haven't had a single one die.
I've gone through 3 WD HDD's in that time.
@@twizz420 between my nas and computers I probably own like 15 hard drives, 8 of them Wd, 5 seagates and the rest hitachi. One of the seagates failed and another is noisy and starting to show some SMART errors, albeit not important ones, but I still don't trust it. No problems from the rest, I got a wd green that's 15yo and 0 errors.
All in all in the 3.5 inch I'd say seagate is just slightly below in reliability but could be put on bad luck or bad batches so I'd say it's hit and miss. Butt for 2.5 hdd the seagates are to be avoided like the plague. I did an internship at a computer repair shop (now work in IT service of an education related company) and everyday I'd swap laptop drives and 95% of the time it was dead seagates.
The "too cheap to be true" fake USB drives have always come with some form of hacked firmware to report as a way higher capacity than they really are.
They will either fill and go no further, or will continuously overwrite itself.
What if they sell it at a normal price then?
@@bleack8701 Then why buy it from them; to wait for those weeks on end?
Literally like 5 dollars less than a legit silicon power drive
I was recently sold a fake SanDisk USB stick. First time I've ever had anything like that happen. I got a full refund.
As always, it's people's innate greed that makes them unable to resist a scam. When the price sounds too good to be true, and if you compare it with other drives of the same size on the same site it costs a lot less, and it has little to no reviews and/or the reviews are all 5 stars, those are all warning klaxons that you shouldn't ignore. A few weeks ago I bought a 256GB Samsung Bar USB stick because I have one of their 64GB models that has held up well for years, they are nice and small so they don't block adjacent ports, they are made of metal so are very tough, and even have a built in part to fit on a keyring if you want. Write speeds are USB2.0 class, but read speeds are USB3.0, and they don't lie about it.
Anyways, the 256GB was on sale for like $28 at Newegg so I bought one and it's the same high quality as the old 64GB one. Then about a week later Newegg had some no-name 1TB metal USB stick for like $25-30. They didn't have any reviews yet, but of course it sold out because people are stupid and greedy. It should be long enough now that I need to go back and look up that drive to see how many buyers will be whinging about how it was a total rip-off.....
Great job informing people about this SSD scam. It's the same exact scam we see all over Amazon and eBay and other sites for years when it came to those super large flash drives that were super cheap! Heck they're still doing it! They're just doing it now to SSDs.
Thanks for info on that software , i ordered portable 4TB SSD from Ali express for only 10$ during black Friday was 64% off ,now I can test properly when it comes ;)
I do think, as you mentioned Bryan, that these scammers do ruin it for newcomers to the scene of M.2 drives with many people not considering them as all will treated as fake by many consumers 😵😢. We need competition to keep prices down ☺🥰👍
Bang on Michael.
Actually SSD prices are going down. You can buy 980PRO 1Tb for less than 100$ and that is a top tier model.
@@dat_21 this is true, in The States anyway.
Thank you for making this video. It's good folks like you who make up for the scammers
It is always a good idea to assert due diligence when shopping, knowing scams are always at the ready to fool you into a dubious purchase.
I saw the same scam on Aliexpress it had a lot of fake reviews on the listing for completely different products.
We appreciate you doing what you can to educate people in the market for parts where this sort of scam is a problem! I know when my wife and I bought our 480GB SSD's almost 2 years ago, they were around $45 and now there are legit SATA 1TB drives in the $48-$52 range from TeamGroup, TimeTec, and SP and others. So seeing something for 2/3 that price isn't as much of a red flag to a buyer, but as you showed above, it's something that one needs to watch out for. RMprepUSB looks to be quite useful if someone wanted to be absolutely certain before using a drive of questionable integrity.
Too bad we can't have a nice DRAM cache nVME 1TB m.2 drive for around $75-80, seems those are almost all $100 and up. Gen 4 like a 980 Pro even like $130 or more.
@@username8644 I do try to opt for nicer when possible, but keep in mind not everyone spends that much. Yes spent more on my old Titan Xp collectors edition than $1200, and typically I prefer 4x GPU setups, but most people aren't running sub-zero phase cooled computers for daily use (or even liquid nitrogen for overclocking, though I mean I'm a bit of an exception). I still find the cheaper ones useful for laptops since SATA protocol is already snail speeds, so why would I spend way more than I need to for a SATA drive? Even the 2TB TeamGroup NVME I've got running in this machine right now was only like $140 (which is less than I spent on the 1TB Corsair drive in my gaming laptop, but if I want more speed on my desktop I'll just do a multi-tier raid since I have a Threadripper and that's going to get more speed than a drive that maxes out x4 PCIEgen3)
Like my Linux laptop, it has like a 240 GB drive that's like $20 from 3 years ago or something, it works fine. Now with similar drives costing $50-$60 for legitimate 1 TB you have to understand most people aren't doing much more than checking their email and browsing the web, only a few of us have 2x 1300 PSUs in our daily machines, have our 3x 4k monitor setup, run virtual machines for multiple OS's at once, run AI generation grograms or CFD analysis. I do all those, but even still, some of my machines I can't tell the difference between PCIe 3.0 maxed out speeds and about 2 GB/s read/write from cheaper drives (their pitiful Intel CPUs just are not fast enough to notice, or they are running Linux and then even a potato feels like a rocket ship).
For 99% of the population though, they can't tell the difference in speed, and I bet your still bottlenecked somewhere else like your OS or your program itself, and most people just browsing the web for 95+% of the time.
Pretty rampant practice indeed lately, thanks for the heads-up my Aussie brother 🔥🚀
The cheapest safe option I found (in EU) are 256gb NVME pulled from OEM systems on Ebay sold as new. I got one for 17€ (now they raised a bit in price to 20€), it's a WD SN530 under HP. Generally these are from professional sellers, mostly with Premium badge and more often than not from your own country. On CrystalDiskInfo shown less than 1 hour power on hours.
I know it's not the newest and fastest drive, and definitely not a great capacity, but for a budget boot drive I think they are more than enough and are from known brands. Also saw 1TB Sata brand SSD going for 60€ on Amazon from times to times.
Nice
Thanks for the video. My drive is similar on photos to your 980 and is already on the way as I bought it earlier. Now I know how to check if it's fake or not when it arrives.
Awesome video as always - Had the experience of fake spaced MicroSD cards that started corrupting data. Not fun to get these- FAKE TEST before you do ANYTHING!
Bryan, I told you about this scam months ago. The price of SSDs has come down so much now there isn't much point risking it with shady sellers.
Two and a half years before, my sister bought a "Scandisk 256 Gb microSD Card" for her smartphone from AliExpress because sometimes those are cheaper than tech stores here in Mexico. First 3 weeks, it works with no problems but after a month... Messages like "There is a problem with your storage sd card, please check", missing photos, corrupted files, random crashed system apps and sometimes pc did not recognize it. Fortunately, she had backups in Google Photos and Drive so she bought another Scandisk microsd card in a local tech store, paying a bit more and until today no problems, errors or crashes. Please, be careful with those "offers" or cheaper prices before you click "Add to cart".
Thanks for looking out for all of us! Deals are definitely on people's radar as the holidays approach!
If they only just had a smaller capacity than advertised it would not be nearly as bad.
But that is not the reason why your system did not boot up anymore. The problem is far far worse: The controller will act as if the drive really had that capacity and if you write new files to it you WILL be able to write to the drive and will be able to see those new files. So what is the problem?
It just writes to the same storage over and over again - overwriting everything that was there before. In your case as it was the system-drive you were simply deleting your OS by downloading more stuff.
Hey, i notice you where looking for soft that can actualy give you a read out on the size of the disk, the utilitary called "H2testw" can give you that without spitting errors on errors , it can take times (depending on the size of the spoofed drive) but at the end you will get the answers you needed . Get well !
This isn't exactly new scam, but it just has been harder to recreate this with nvme. This very same method has been used with USB sticks, external HDD's and external SSD's. It just loops through first few gigs or just firmware says it's 1TB while it actually is 60G or some such.
Easier to pull of with closed enclosures where as nvme is very open so you cannot use cheap microSD's to cheat.
I got a 2tb one from Amazon for 90 USD and I did the tests with fakedisk the same program you used in the video and it didn't give errors it was 1.86tb.
Thanks for the Video, i saw these on ebay yesterday and there's HEAPS of them for sale and thought i'd google Fake SSDs and your video came up, there's some massive size external drives cheap too that would also be fake no doubt. i hope this video can go viral on Facebook etc.
Thank you for highlighting this, and pointing to a good program to test the drives. I purchased a few of these drives here in Australia and will be testing them all and most likely pursuing a refund through eBay.
The thing is many times the sellers themselves get scammed. I personally know a entrepreneur who bought 100 gpu's (1050ti) from china during the mining craze to sell the cards in budget gaming builds, but he received gts 450/560 cards which just had 1050ti heatsinks and fans. And the worst part is it was only after 40+ builds sold that he came to know this when I purchased one for myself. He was devastated to say the least.
So he built and sold 40 'gaming' computers without doing any kind of significant performance testing, after sourcing cheap GPUs from China during a shortage...
Just a heads up: Office Depot has their 1TB Sandisk SSD's on sale for $79.99 until 12-3-22. Yea, $32 would raise a BIG red flag for me! If it's too good to be true, it probably is!
Personally, I wouldn't bother with a dedicated test program. I'd just take a large video file (30+ GB), make a script that copies the file to the new drive as "1.mp4", "2.mp4", "3.mp4" etc, as many times as there's supposed to be space. Then I'd take a smaller video file (≈3 GB) and copy it to fill the drive further. After that, I'd seek through all the copies to see if they all play back correctly.
I have seen many customer review with photo of the label side and the very same serial number on the one I have is displayed. On another site I see the same label, but this time is on the back of a SAMSUNG SSD case.
Just got in one of those 2TB SSD drives. RMPREP shows the same error. What does,did it cost to ship back to Chyna? 2 days after ordering one person reported those 2TB drive to be fake. All other orders where 500GB ones. People just don't test or do not know how to test. The seller replied: Please do not use irregular software to test the hard disk and second: Dear, this may be caused by poor connection. It is recommended to replace the cable and adapter or try it on other devices. Thank you
Aliexpress did not accept evidence that I provided that the SSD drive is counterfeit - convenient. Aliexpress harboring counterfeit sellers! Yeah, I got my money back and the seller continue selling fakes and make money. Customers will lose data sooner or later.
It is no longer about 'you get what you pay for' but who you pay to. Made a purchase today: 2TB ssd external and a couple of usbs. Kingston. Drectly from Kingston. No Scamazon, no ebay, no Aliexpress. Directly from the company.
Are Crucial a good make? I was ready to spend £60 on a 1TB Crucial on Amazon the other day. Specificly for storage purposes.
just buy good branded ssd from retail shops or amazon, they are not that expensive now. just get 256gb if you don't have budget and add a hard drive for basic storage
If you can read the memory chip # you can lookup it's datasheet for it's size.
Hey I love your videos been watching here since 2017, recently I have been flipping used PCs on my area, I came across this cheap Ryzen 3 3200g PC where the seller said it does not POST, I thought it was simply caused by other components, tried swapping it out the motherboard, ram, etc. But it still won't POST, have you come across with this issue before? If so, is there anything you did to revive a Ryzen processor?
Thanks for the info!! Was thinking of shopping for a budget drive.
0:41 That drives logo seems to be a copy of the acdelco logo witch is funny since acdelco is a car part manufacturer.
Will take a look at that application, cheers Bryan!
Vaseky is the first ssd I've bought that was unknown to me. It was $60 MLC 1TB, for MLC. I was skeptical. And WD were 55 TLC. $38 for a 1TB is just too good to be true. Thanks for sharing.
Hey man not sure if you noticed but the audio seems to be out of sync. Not an issue though just letting you know if you didn't already.
What do you mean they NOW appear as fake drives? The overstated capacity in windows/diskmgmt is not new at all and has been an issue for quite a while. Originally started on SD cards years ago. This is not new at all 😂
scammers became more and more harder to spot these days.
Great content as always and so important to get this information out....
I bought similar SSD 4 TB for 30 USD from AliExpress. The OS acknowledge the drive for 3.7TB, but ever since you copy and paste file into the new disk, it start acting weird and stop at certain point. I returned the disk to the AliExpress and waiting for the refund.
I ordered this 2TB cheap SSD one, should i use it? If yes, for what purpose, gaming, file storage,.....etc?
I ordered it to be either as a back storage or just a drive for files transfer between computers, i won't use it as a main drive for OS or gaming at all, but is it safe for storage anyway.
I saw these the other day looking at PC parts. Huge red flag with prices that low.
I just bought a Samsung 4TB SSD off Amazon couple of days ago. Once I installed it I opened up Samsung Magician software which tells you if it is genuine or not and low and behold it said it wasn't. What I want to know is how do these people get away with selling them on Amazon? There is no way to see if it is fake or not, if I did not know about the software I would probably have kept it but I sent it back.
11:02 human stupidity certainly seems like a form of hypnotism xD
what do you think about Netac?
they have some drives for cheap, nvme gen 4, 2 tb with dram for like $ 129.
at that price you can buy a much better and reliable unit, like the 980 pro by samsung. but 2tb with dram for $ 129...
if time passed and you can`t return them, don`t throw them away, you can still use them in older laptops: see what is the real capacity, let`s say 120gigs, delete all partitions on it and create only one partition with windows manager of 119 gigs, let all the "remaining" space unallocated and there you go, you have an ok ssd for system or something else
I also use "not known" brand SSD. I am using Kingmax SSD now for 3 years and still has 100% health.
yeah i had same problem with undercapacity sd card back in the day :(
I tried to warn Amazon about these drives but the CS person I was talking to defended the fake drives as real ones. I finally just left feedback on the drive being advertised. No way it was real. $30 for a 2tb ssd.
Didn't know AC-DELCO has gone from auto parts to ssds, lol!
That Acclamator drive's logo is a knockoff of something, ACDelco I think. (ACDelco is a car parts company)
I haven't been hosed with pc hardware so far thanks to you!
Hey Just ran across your video. I just came across my fake M.2 4TB on ebay. I did get my money back after talking with the seller about the fake M.2
Did you try installing the drive in a USB enclosure then using FakeFlash?
COTT Purple Mistral 2tb is a rebadged Corsair MP600 I picked up for $125.
I have a Asus Prime b550-PLUS which Asus replaced with another. Both have the same problem. It boots up to the home screen, never gives you the chance to hit del or F2 to get into the bios. The CPU is 7 3700x. I have several Asus MBs, this is the first problem I've had.
It's the same scam that went around involving fake micro SD cards.
For people around a MicroCenter in the US, 1TB drives are about $50 right now and you can just walk in the store and get one.
I'm using one of their NVMe that cost double that at the time and it's been working fantastic for years. Not the fastest out there but not a slouch with its Phison controller and Toshiba memory (at least on my specific one, they change OEMs sometimes).
I actually swear by their house-brand SSD and flash memory as I buy the stuff constantly and nothing has failed me yet.
EDIT: I did just now notice the $50 drives are QLC and I've only ever aimed for TLC memory drives, which they're selling for more money. On that note I hope it holds up as well as all these other drives around here cuz I'm 'bout to try some.
MicroCenter is that, to small to be around one and not like a Bestbuy
how is this test program effective? how would you know those errors are indicating a fake drive? just appears to be a program error. weird program design if you ask me.
Longest lasting drive I ever owned was a KingDian 256GB, first as an external SSD for an OG Xbox One, then One X, and finally into my first PC Build as a backup drive. Now its in a cheap build done for a mate's kid and still going strong, must be 8 or 9 years old at this point and never failed. Lately whenever there's a sale its Crucial, Kingston or Kioxia 1TB Gen 3 drives for £55-65, great for cheap clean builds
I owned a Kingdian 256GB too. Really good drive.
It's now being used by a friend.
Actually if you're on Amazon Prime you can get 1TB drives pretty cheap. Teamgroup's 1TB drive sometimes goes for around $60 or less if there is a Prime day sale.
Oh man, it took them longer than i thought to do this. I remember getting screwed on a USB thumb drive some years ago. Same thing they flash firmware for a bigger drive on them. Only with the SD/USB devices they even rip off other brands.
They've been pulling this scam with SD cards for literally years. This is the same program that I used to prove that some SD cards I bought were fakes.
I think that Acclamator is going to get sued by AC-Delco.
Check endorfy coolers like fera 5 dual, fortis 5 dual, navis f280 and f360
Hi, would the drive also return questionable results if you tried to partition it?
I purchased one a few weeks ago to test. It managed about 100gb before it ran out of space once it ran out of space it bricked itself. I assume once all the memory was taken up it somehow didn't have enough space left to fool the drive. Anyone who has bought one make sure you file your dispute with AliExpress as the seller will likely try and get you to cancel the dispute and jump through hoops testing rather than payout
And is there any way to delete the fake amount of gigabytes so it shows the actual size of the drive in your OS?
The problem is there are proper drives that look exactly like that and unbranded
Patriot Burst are normally cheap on amazon au and work out cheap with prime. Decent bang for Buck for Australians.
dammmmm, I just bought one of these from ebay for £35. I thought I got a bargain. I have installed windows on it but have not tried to fill it yet. There is no brand name, just a glossy printed label saying 'Red SATA SSD 1TB' I bought it about a month ago so it will be too late to raise a complaint. gutted, but thanks for the info.
i buy one from aliexpress. 1tb 2.5”. yes its around 30+ usd. i was only relying on feedbacks. thankfully it works as intended. i only ever did speed test and its more or less the same with other ssd. but i didnt run rmprep cos i dnt know about it. already install os on that drive and move games. so far 500~ gb left. no problem for these past 2 months so far.
H2testw will test for this too. It may be slow but it will get the job done either way.
I didn't risk getting a 2TB SATA SSD even on known stores around my area, I got it directly from Samsung and its a bit more expensive but if the less chance I'm getting a ripoff (imagine getting a bootleg 2TB from the official Samsung Store). Since I looked it up before especially the QVO series where you can actually get convincing fakes ones. But yeah it would be nice to know which noname brands to trust since in some regions some stores are still living in La-La Land.
RMPrep is a quite handy software Bryan. I also used it before to spot fake portable drives that are popping off everywhere online!
4:28 what a divorce!🤣
Slang sometimes being translated by Google is a next level post-irony...
I just bought (and received) a usb-c external drive labelled as '128 TB' from Ali, for about €50 ; sure, I knew it's fake but I was just curious what the heck would be inside the case; doing a 20TB copy now, already getting errors; I of course didn't use it as the OS drive, just usb extra storage...
A local retailer (MicroCenter) is selling a 512gb SSD for $20.00 usd .... in store only .... so $40 for a 1tb doesn't seem too far fetched 🤔
I hear that f3 can also identify fake drives - great for Linux and Mac users who for some reason are unable to use Windows. (Plug "f3 linux" into your favorite search engine.)
middle of winter? mate you're in queensland and we're almost in summer.
Yeah, Im good with the GPU's I have, I bought a 6800xt for way to much.... But I ended up picking up a Evga ftw3 3080ti for $300 usd, and it just has a flacky display port, it works, but any monitor plugged into that port will flicker or show some sort of corruption until you like hold it up, so I think whoever had it had their cord maybe managed to tight, The other ports work fine, not even a big deal. I sold my 6800xt to my brother, That card performs nearly as well as my 3080ti its impressive, just no ray tracing and no DLSS, and its only limited to FSR, Where Nvidia, DLSS and FSR works on it, so I took the nvidia route for that alone, plus with a mild OC the 3080ti does end up being faster.
or you can just boot linux from USB, write zeroes into file on disk and see at what capacity you hit the message "no space left on device". Non destructive, just one big file.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zerofile bs=1M, when it fails do rm /tmp/zerofile
As a bonus it refreshes those nand cells once.
As you show, there are some legitimate SSDs/SDs that are cheap and real, however, you do need to remember that NAND is binned just like any other silicon. I have a no-name (Heoriady) dram-less 1tb SSD that I bought a long time ago with an SM controller and SanDisk NAND. It's still working great, performance is better than most. I just don't use it for anything critical.
I agree, but the binning part it usually doesn't matter, you can't really forge something as advanced as nand chips so they will definitely from big companies like sandisk etc. Knowing the controller and nand there's no reason stability can be affected. Even some of the new hacky realtek controller + refurbished UFS phone storage ssd's aren't bad since phones usually don't get intensive writes. Ironically all the ssd's that dies on me are brand name stuff for some reason but that's a different sample size.
Wow. Definitely nobody else has made this video. Thank god we have Brian to tell us all that there are scams on the internet. I almost didn't believe it the first 8 times.
Its like those fake SD cards where it says its really big (idk 128/256gb) that were super cheap, and would be like 8-16gb. After that space runs out, instead of crapping out like this SSD, they just start rewriting the data, so it seems like it can hold a lot of GB. Think Bryan even had a vid on those as well.
Edit: Okay, 5 sec after posting this he mentioned those as well lol
The same happened to me with a micro sd card I put it my phone thinking that it was 64gig but in actual fact it was about 8gig and when it got full I lost all my data including pictures after family that I'll never get back.
You should make one video about good and cheap SSD Brands you recommend, I have bought a few good SSD's from aliexpress but I'm looking to buy a new m.2 one.
.probably if you open it up , might end up finding a sdcard mounted on a pcb instead of the flashchips commonly used on ssds
You shouldn't bill this as anything new. Flash-memory-based drives that appear as their faked sizes (which overwrite themselves when their real capacities are exceeded), have existed for OVER 10 years now. All it takes is a bootleg firmware job to do this.
The price of Toshiba RC20 1T is pretty dame good in china 440rmb(about 62usd?)
Excellent video, thanks. I recently bought an Ali Express 1 Tb SSD, crazy price, about 25% of normal price. £8 delivered to UK. As you say, properties said 1 TB Tried formatting in FAT and NFTS and both times when I'm trying to copy music and videos to it it craps out and 60 gb. Tried CHKDSK and scan disk for errors in Win 10. They say fixed. I'm just running RMPrep and it has frozen at 95% complete. Any idea what I should now please?
Classic fake symptom. Probably first 95% was writing fast to non-existent flash memory, but remaining 5% is writing to real memory and it may be very slow or getting errors and retrying under Windows which is very slow.
you don't need any programs to test just copy 1 TB or whatever the max storage is and see if it can copy . Sometime it'll say not enough momories or it'll just over ride the data over and over again .
I just like the Acclamator logo looking precisely like an ACDelco auto parts logo. Wonder how they get away with it, but if their m.2 drives work, they are CHEAP on Amazon Prime right now.
thank you for the information about fake items
I was recently in the market for a 128GB microsd card.
I saw some good deals on Amazon and Newegg, but decided it was safer to purchase direct from WD instead.
If its sold by Amazon and not 3rd party they should be fine.
I've bought a bunch of Samsung and sandisk sd cards that were fine
You would think that amazon would have bots to detect things like this "6TB External Hard Drive,Portable Solid State Data Storage Hard Drives,Small Computer Backup Drive with USB 3.0 to Type-C Support for PC Desktops Laptop Compatible with XS Windows(Blue)
Brand: Rouper
£59.99
I noticed on the SSD M.2 starting the timeline of this video starting 2:01 to around 2:10 where doing a test for each SSD M.2 (for example to see whether 1TB SSD for cheaper is real or not), it wasn't secure to the motherboard by screwing in. Because I thought that would it dislodged if let's said that you accidentally bump into your PC or SSD M.2. That's where it led to my question would be, when I wanted to test out each SSD M.2, should I secure it by screwing in just to be safe to the motherboard before began testing the SSD M.2?
I had a Lenovo Y410p, it does have a M.2 slot, but only up to 2242 w/l. I tested a 2280 SSD, with it sticking out and it pretty much works. However, I didn't stick with it too long, I simply wanted to know if it is SATA only, or PCIE only or accepts both or it is for WIFI slot.
That AC Delco knockoff SSD is hilarious.
Those arrows look like the ones in PSP9. Please tell me I'm not the only fossil around here. 😂
Thanks for the heads up!