Imagine this: A PC user snaps up a bargain external M.2 NVMe SSD and is disappointed with the device’s performance, The transfer speeds were so poor they decide to look inside the USB Type-C connected drive case. To their dismay, the half-length PCB uncovered featured two microSD cards, an “ancient” controller, and a port wired for USB 2.0 speeds. These microSD card "SSDs" are actually showing up on market places, reports MyDrivers.
The discovery that cheap no-name products on sketchy online marketplaces can be fake or counterfeit appears to have taken the unlucky Chinese netizen in the piece by surprise. Despite horror stories, frequent warnings, and better judgment people continue to be attracted to goods sold at too-good-to-be-true prices from anything-goes marketplaces.
The unnamed netizen’s suspicions were aroused when their new 512 GB external M.2 NVMe SSD seemed to offer performance that wasn’t even respectable for an external HDD. He decided to take the mobile drive’s case off. You can see the images of what was discovered above below.
Above you can see the inner drive uses a pair of MicroSD slots populated with TF cards. We don’t know the memory card specs, speeds, capacities, or how they were configured. If the cards weren’t 256 GB each, the drive controller firmware might misrepresent their capacities – a common scamming trick. Further investigations showed the small controller chip you can see on the green PCB to be of a very old design. Moreover, the modern USB-C port was only wired for USB 2.0 data transfer performance.
According to the source report, the counterfeit external SSD victim would have seen device read speeds of 100 MB/s at best. MyDrivers also thought write speeds would be measured in tens of MB/s unless the twin MicroSDs were configured in RAID0 (unlikely).
Counterfeit, fake, mislabeled, mis-sold, and sometimes dangerous electronic products can easily be stumbled upon in unreputable online marketplaces worldwide. (Particularly interesting fake products and audacious scams sometimes make the pages of sites like ours). Stick to trusted brands and outlets, be cautious with purported bargains from less trusted sources, and use your common sense. If something is too good to be true, it is.
