There are not only fakes in the art, but also in the hardware, although some of them are usually blatant copies with a mistake made on purpose to capture the most unwary and little else. That is to say, it is clear to the league that they are not the true product. However, when we already talk about commercial products known to the public, things are different. How it happens with the Fake Samsung 980 Pros that have appeared lately.
It is not the first time that we are talking about an SSD unit created with the aim of deceiving the user, but this time we are not talking about impossible capacities, nor about any strange composition made up of MicroSD, but about something much worse. From a product that at first glance seems like another, but it is not and in which it is much easier to fall.
Beware of fake Samsung 980 Pro
The Samsung 980 Pro is an NVMe SSD in the M.2 form factor that is clearly recognized by many of the aficionados in the world of PC hardware. However, we don’t know who came up with the idea of creating a fake version, which has a label that is exactly the same as the original, but as you will understand, the rest of the components are not the same.
We must start from the fact that the Korean multinational not only has its foundry to create its RAM memories, flash controllers and NAND Flash memories, but it is also, together with Intel, one of the few companies that is not fabless and, therefore, design both its own chips and manufactures them. And this is the point that differentiates the fake Samsung 980 Pro from the original product, since while the original units use components from the South Korean multinational, their counterparts, on the other hand, do not.
How to differentiate them?
Well, at first glance, due to the following points:
- Fake Samsung 980 Pro flash driver is a MAXIO MAP1602Awhich is a design without own RAM memorythis means that it has to use the system one to work and it has a much lower performance than the original model in reading and writing, both sequential and random.
- From the moment they use a DRAM less controllerSo it’s going to be much lower. But how much? Well, let’s say that if the original models can reach a transfer speed of 7 GB/s, the Fake Samsung 980 Pro stays at 4.8 GB/s. Keep in mind that if you are going to use it for your PS5 the minimum specification is 5.5 GB/s.
- As for the flash memory chips, the fake Samsung 980 Pro uses memory from the Chinese foundry YMTC. As for the original models, we don’t need to tell you that South Koreans don’t need to ask third parties for their memory.
Although such is the intention to deceive the user, that they have achieved that the PCI ID is that of a Samsung 980 Pro, to the point where Windows recognizes it as such. Consider that one of the reasons why the operating system recognizes the component is due to the fact that it identifies itself as such. Since all NVMe SSDs work the same way, they can easily slip into the unsuspecting public. Not to mention that it is even sold with packaging that perfectly imitates the original.
