[IngvarLynn]

There is a flood of fake SSDs currently, mostly big brands. I've recently purchased counterfeit 1TB. It passes all the tests, performance is ok, it works... except it gets episodes where ioping would be anything between 0.7 ms and 15 seconds, that is under zero load. And these are quality fakes from a physical appearance perspective. The only way I could tell mine was fake is that the official Kingston firmware update tool would not recognize this drive.

[loeg]

Where are you seeing counterfeits? AliExpress, Ebay, Amazon?

[Shekelphile]

Probably chinese sellers on all those sites. I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon or from more traditional retail channels.

[vineyardmike]

There’s definitely a problem with my grandma or some less-technically educated person buying “alphabet soup” fakes, BUT Amazon does commingle inventory. This means that lots of people can end up with fakes sold by 3rd parties when buying from a reputable brand.

There were even stories of those crazy coupon people reselling on Amazon, and some cases of returned retail products ending up as “new” on Amazon. Which gets problematic with certain things like consumables (the WSJ did an article on toothpastes iirc).

[alias_neo]

> alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon

Does this actually make a difference? I remember the issue was that Amazon would bin devices together regardless if they're from some random third-party or direct sale, so you could have fakes mixed in with genuine and it was basically a lucky dip.

Is this not still the case?

Ultimately, I'd be weary of buying things like this from Amazon and as you suggest go to a more traditional retail channel instead.

[Shekelphile]

Amazon only comingles inventory among FBA sellers, and gives each an option to opt-out from it if they want to. They never comingle 'sold by amazon.com' items. In cases where I've bought amazon.com items and not from FBA sellers I never received bad products, and I've easily bought dozens of SD cards, flash drives, SSDs, etc.

[traceroute66]

> I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon

AMEN to that !

And the most annoying thing is that those of us who know to avoid FBA is that Amazon have removed the "sold by Amazon" search filter tick-box.

So whilst in the past you could tick a box and be presented with a list of products which are direct-sold rather than FBA, you cannot do that anymore.

According to some Reddit posts, you can still do it if you hack the URL and add an "emi=$obscure_value" GET-param. But I'm guessing sooner or later Amazon will kill this work-around too.

[JonChesterfield]

Sold by amazon means "taken out of a box containing fakes and maybe real products". If that's your gamble, may as well buy the fake directly at lower cost.

[alanfranz]

Did you get the fake in an official box? Or OEM version? This is quite a big claim.

[iamacyborg]

It doesn't strike me as being a big claim, I recently bought some RAM for a NUC a few weeks ago on Amazon only to determine that it was likely counterfeit. It came in an official box with all packaging intact.

[slowmotiony]

Then how did you determine it was fake?

[iamacyborg]

I installed it in my system after which it had severe stability issues.

Running dmidecode showed that the part number didn’t match the sticker on the module.

[vladvasiliu]

That's interesting. I have a Samsung 990 pro bought on Amazon and have the random lags. I've only noticed it in the terminal, so I figured something else may be the culprit. Never went to 15 secondes, but it can be around 1s.

The Samsung Magician app on Windows reports it as "genuine" and it was able to apply two firmware updates. The only thing it complains about is that I should be using PCIE 4 instead of 3, but I can't do anything about that.

[thargor90]

I have been able to fix these random lags by doing multiple full disk reads. The first one will take very long, because it will trigger these lags. Subsequent ones will be much better.

The leading theory I have read is that maintenance/refreshing on the ssd is not done preventative/correctly by the firmware and you need to trigger it by accessing the data.

[vladvasiliu]

I'm going to try that, but I have little hope since this happened ever since the drive was brand new.

[schainks]

If you dig at the vendor data stored on the drive firmware, fakes are easy to spot. Model numbers, vendor ID, and serial numbers will be zero’d out or not conforming to manufacturer spec.

I purchased a bunch of fake kingston SD cards in China that worked well enough for the price, but crapped out within a year of mild use. I didn’t lose data. It was as if one day they worked. Then one day they were fried.

[jwells89]

That’s wild. Is this limited to specific distribution channels or can you get them from anywhere?

[archsurface]

How do you conclude from a single drive that there is a flood?