Counterfeit Samsung 980 Pro SSDs Doing The Rounds In Asian PC Market

wccftech.com:

Counterfeit Samsung 980 Pro SSDs have seemingly entered the Asian PC market with several users affected by these fake storage devices.

The Samsung 980 Pro SSD is one of the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drives that one can get hands-on. There are competitors now that offer better value and performance but there's no doubt that the 980 Pro was the first to offer some insanely fast speeds. With that said, the 980 Pro is a popular SSD choice for gamers and new PC builders but it looks like some people are outfitting pre-builts and selling a range of counterfeit SSDs among which is the Samsung 980 Pro.

One user at the Baidu Forums showed pictures and screenshots of what he thought was the 980 Pro SSD from Samsung. Turns out, it was something entirely different. The Firmware and storage device name have been tampered with to make it show as a Samsung 980 Pro SSD but in reality, it offers far less read and write speeds than what the 980 Pro is capable of. The SSD only managed around 4.8 GB/s Reads and 4.4 GB/s Write speeds which are well below the 7.0 GB/s and 5.1 GB/s (Read / Write) speeds of the drive.

The SSD even has the properly labeled sticker of the Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB device but it's under the sticker where everything is wrong. The controller has the Maxio branding which is produced over in China. Do remember that Samsung produces its controllers entirely at its own fabrication facilities in South Korea. Furthermore, the Maxio "MAP1602-I" drives stated here comes with a DRAM-less design but they do support PCIe Gen 4 NVMe 2.0 standard.

Now it is hard to tell whether the Samsung 980 Pro SSD you are getting is a counterfeit or the real deal if you are getting it within a pre-built PC. You have to thoroughly check to confirm if its