Beware of buying! The cheap Samsung 990 Pro turned out to be a slow scam

A wave of counterfeit SSDs has hit the market, targeting unwary shoppers looking for a bargain. While the devices appear to be identical to Samsung's top-of-the-line 990 Pro, the label hides a completely different story. Instead of the promised speed and reliability, customers are receiving a device that performs slower than their old USB sticks, causing a lot of anger and financial damage.

Users on online forums are reporting unusually cheap versions of the popular Samsung 990 Pro SSD. Upon receipt, these drives, which are a standard 8 cm long, look completely authentic, including the packaging and stickers. The problems begin immediately after installation in a computer, when it turns out that the read and write speeds are limited to a measly 20 MB/s, which is a thousand times less than the performance of the real product.

Hardware analysis revealed that the counterfeits do not contain Samsung controllers or NAND memory at all. Instead, they use the cheapest possible components, which are often software-engineered so that the operating system initially displays the wrong capacity, such as 2 TB or 4 TB. When the user tries to load a larger amount of data, the system crashes or starts overwriting existing files. For buyers who paid anywhere from €45 to €90 for these “bargain” purchases, this is a painful lesson that a price that is too good to be true is almost always a sign of a scam.

Experts advise that buyers only buy their components from trusted retailers. A genuine Samsung 990 Pro usually costs between €160 and €210, depending on capacity. Counterfeit copies are often sold in Asian markets and unverified websites. If you have already made a purchase, check the device with Samsung Magician; if the software does not recognize it, you have a fake in your hands, which is only a few millimeters thick, but can cause you a lot of problems with data loss.