A few days ago, the site ReviewGeek boned a “portable SSD” available at an unbeatable price. Think of it, a capacity of 16 terabytes for a tariff of less than 100 dollars, it is a unique bargain. There was just one problem: this product was a crude fake, with ridiculous performance and a capacity that fell far short of the promised 16TB of storage.
We, too, looked for cheap SSDs with an exceptional amount of storage on the French version of Amazon. And we quickly noticed that they abounded, just like in the United States. In a few clicks, we have unearthed dozens of models with an enticing amount of storage: 10 TB, even 16 TB, available at variable prices, but always below 100 euros.
Dozens of products from different brands, with exotic names… but with very similar designs, classified by Amazon’s algorithm in a strange way, between devices from well-known players, such as Sandisk or Samsung. Products which, for some, are even eligible for “Prime” delivery, by Amazon, which many customers take for a guarantee of quality.
We therefore set our sights on one of these models, in order to find out what exactly these “SSDs” had in their stomachs. spoiler : nothing at all or almost. This is what we discovered, after a number of manipulations and measurements in the 01Lab.
Unpacking and connection: we already feel that we are not going to like it
First there is the packaging, which at the outset inspires little confidence. No visible brand, no “CE” logo, which is essential for storage media sold in the European Union. And some rare information on the back, which, as we will see, is incorrect. We therefore learn that the disc would be in “M.2” format, that it would benefit from a USB 3.1 interface. All of this is completely false.
Unpacked, the product can (almost) deceive. It’s a cute little pebble, equipped – no doubt to give it a false air of modernity – with a USB Type-C socket. No mark is visible here either. Our SSD comes with a tiny and cheap USB-C to USB-A cable, to connect it to your computer.
Our measurements: the slowest “SSD” on the market?
Let’s go for the connection. (Only) good news: The device is perfectly recognized by Windows 11, and proudly displays 16 TB of counter storage. But as we will see below, it is an old trick and very easy to implement for scammers to “tamper” with the real storage space of a medium.
To test the disk, we run a first file copy. This is a long series of rushes stored on a (real, that one) SSD of the editorial video department. 40 GB that we duplicated in less than two minutes on our computer. And which we then duplicated from the machine to our cheap disk. And there, we realize that we will have to be very patient. Because this “SSD” tops out at… 15.5 MB/s!
That’s almost forty times slower than real SSD transfer rates. What took us only a few minutes before will last almost an hour and a half here! And even much more, because the disk was suddenly disconnected in the middle of a transfer, for no reason. We had to do it three times before we succeeded in copying our unfortunate forty gigabytes.
These ridiculous performances are confirmed by the 01Lab measurements. We subjected the disc to two benchmarks popular, which aim to test the performance of a storage medium in reading and writing. The results are… catastrophic, a thousand miles from what an SSD, even entry-level, is capable of offering. It’s so bad, in fact, that the measurement tools crashed several times during the tests.
CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD thus display on average read and write speeds that oscillate between 10 and 16 MB/s, regardless of the size of the files copied. We could laugh, but even at 80 euros, such a level of performance is theft.
It is all the more mediocre as we obviously do not have access to the promised 16 TB. We thus copied several series of large files on the device, at the cost of long hours of waiting. But we did not, fortunately, have to reach 16 TB to realize that there was a “wolf”. After storing some 100GB of data on the device, we then tried to read it from disk. Huge problem: while we did manage to open some files, many others were actually corrupted, even though the copy seemed to go smoothly.
Again, this is a trick used by the scammers who sell this crap: the data is indeed written… but overwrites the data that was previously stored. We knew it now: our “SSD” actually has less than 100 GB of space: we are far from 16 TB!
Bad surprise when opening the disc
But what is this fake SSD hiding? Is it really M2 media as the box says? Obviously not. It is also easy to realize this, if only by the thermal footprint of the device, which heats up very little, unlike a heavily used SSD.
Lionel Morillon, head of 01Lab, was able to open the case after a few manipulations of which he has the secret… and discovered what you see below.
No, no SSD on the horizon, but a simple… MicroSD reader with a card – without any visible storage capacity – inserted inside! We immediately inserted it into a card reader, without going through the device controller, we finally have access to its real storage capacity: 58.61 GB. of 10 euros. You thought you were getting a good deal with this SSD at a low price? It’s the opposite: you paid almost ten times too much for your storage.
Looking closer, we notice an inscription on the controller. A brand, and a reference: “Chipsbank CBM2199S”. There are few details of this controller on the web. But quickly, we understand his interest in scammers.
This chip – and its innumerable variants – are indeed “flashable” through an obscure software, available mainly on Russian-speaking forums. It allows in particular to force the controller to tamper with the size of the disk displayed by the OS, and to configure the overwriting of previously stored data.
This is how the scammers selling these drives trick you into thinking you’ve plugged in a 16TB medium… when all you have is a ridiculously large “noname” MicroSD card.
A few tips to avoid being fooled
This scam is far from new and does not only concern SSDs. It is just as easy to find fake USB keys forged with the same kind of technique. To avoid being tricked, it’s -fortunately- rather simple. First, it’s obvious: beware of prices that are too low. Yes, a 16 TB SSD for less than 100 euros is simply impossible. For a real 4 TB NVMe external SSD from a famous brand (SanDisk), it takes no less than around 550 euros.
Before buying, it is also essential to look at the opinions of other Internet users who have already tried the product. In our case, we deliberately ignored the few comments that rightly cried scam. Note, however, that this is not always possible: scammers tend to multiply the references to limit negative reviews and even sometimes to “spammer” the reviews to artificially increase the rating.
The ideal would obviously be for Amazon to clean up its listings, which would sometimes deserve a serious sweep. But that’s another story…
