Fake SSD '990 Pro' appears, super cheap but also super slow

Worth mentioning here is that the price of 40 USD is 7 times cheaper than the genuine product (priced at 299 USD), the performance of this 'counterfeit' drive model is also exactly 7 times worse!

In terms of packaging design and product stickers, the fake '990 Pro' version is quite similar to the original so it can fool less experienced buyers. As for experienced users, they will recognize the difference such as the font used to print on the sticker of the fake version is different from the regular font Samsung uses, with the underlines looking thicker.

On the sticker of the counterfeit version, the manufacturer is Delaihe Electronics Co., "Tltd", a non-existent company, and the link to the website and QR code of 'this manufacturer' are also fake.

The easiest thing to distinguish is that the Samsung 990 Pro drive is made in Korea, while the clone is made in China.

According to Reddit user nukklear, the codename of the SSD controller that is often printed on the surface of fake SSDs has been removed. However, the SSD controller codename on the back of the drive's PCB remains and shows that the clone drive uses a Realtek RTS5765DL, a controller without PCIe 3.0 x4 DRAM, supporting four NAND channels and speeds up to 1,200 MT/s.

The results of the GRC ValiDrive test, a free application that verifies the real capacity of the device, show that user nukklear received an SSD model with a real capacity of 4TB, but it is not Samsung 990 Pro.

The counterfeit "990 Pro" SSD was also tested on the CrystalDiskMark " application after installing it in an external Ugreen M.2 SSD box. The result is that even though it has a capacity of 4TB, the performance of this counterfeit drive is slower. Genuine products up to 7 times. Counterfeit '990 Pro' offers sequential read and write speeds of 1,000 MB/s and 628 MB/s respectively while genuine products achieve read and write speeds of up to 7,450 / 6,900 respectively MB/s.

As for real-world performance, user nukklear notes that before dropping to 30 MB/s and eventually remaining below 10 MB/s, the '990 Pro's initial data transfer speed was 100 MB/s. . When testing the "990 Pro" with the bootable USB drive creation application RMPrepUSB, Windows failed to recognize the drive and then recognized it as a "Realtek drive of some kind". However, the fake SSD eventually stopped working.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 24 October 2023