Buyer beware: Fake Samsung 1080 Pro 4TB SSD promising unbelievable 15.8 GB/s speeds for $43 is too good to be true

1080 Pro
1080 Pro (Image credit: AliExpress)

With advertised speeds up to 15.8 GB/s, the 1080 Pro would outperform the majority of the best SSDs on the market. Unfortunately, this is all false advertising, and Quasarzone has found that the 1080 Pro sometimes performs worse than a USB 2.0 pendrive.

You can find some legitimate deals on AliExpress, but most of the time, you'll find obscure deals that are a waste of time and effort. This 1080 Pro SSD is a perfect example. If a 4TB NVMe with a $43.68 price tag isn't enough to raise the red flags, then the advertised specifications should. The merchant promotes the 1080 Pro as a PCIe 4.0 drive, so there's no chance the SSD will hit the outrageous sequential read and write speeds of up to 15.8 GB/s and 14.5 GB/s, respectively. Not even the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives — like the Crucial T705 2TB — can offer that kind of performance.

Given the popularity of Samsung SSDs, it's not surprising that many Chinese factories tailor their bogus products to imitate Samsung's designs. Although the AliExpress seller was careful not to include Samsung's name in the listing or the marketing materials, it's evident that the 1080 Pro aims to pose as a Samsung product to deceive less-experienced users. The 1080 Pro utilizes a model name that insinuates it is the successor to the popular 990 Pro mimics the SSD's aesthetics.

1080 Pro Benchmarks

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SSDATTO Disk Benchmark (Read, 4MB)ATTO Disk Benchmark (Write, 4MB)CrystalDiskMark (Read, SEQ1M Q8T1)CrystalDiskMark (Write, SEQ1M Q8T1) Bandizip (Compression, 21GB)Bandizip (Decompression, 21GB)100GB Single File Copy Test
Samsung 980 Pro 1TB6,420 MB/s4,610 MB/s6,863.56 MB/s4,947.35 MB/s64 seconds16 seconds32.79 seconds
1080 Pro 4TB1,180 MB/s649 MB/s1261.04 MB/s674.07 MB/s301 seconds227 seconds1,815.46 seconds

The 1080 Pro has a single NAND chip with TK1YL4BAAH2 marking. It's a fake serial number that the factory laser-etched on the NAND, so it doesn't return any results from a Google search. However, SSD monitoring and diagnostic software detects the flash as Intel-branded 96-layer (B27A) 3D TLC NAND. The Realtek RTS5765/66 controller supports PCIe 3.0 speeds and is a DRAM-less design. As expected, the 1080 Pro is far from offering the advertised performance, but Quasarzone tested the SSD for the laughs.

In synthetic benchmarks like ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark, the Samsung 980 Pro delivered over 5X higher read performance and 7X higher write performance than the 1080 Pro. In Bandizip, the 980 Pro took 78% less time to compress 21GB of files than the 1080 Pro. As for decompression, the 980 Pro finished at 93% lower time. In a real-world usage test, such as copying a single 100GB file, the 980 Pro required a little over half a minute, while the 1080 Pro needed over half an hour.

The drive doesn't provide 4TB of storage either, considering the single NAND chip. That means if you were to attempt to write that much data to the SSD, at some point it would either fail or start overwriting existing data.

Sadly, many fake Samsung SSDs are on the market, especially on Chinese e-commerce platforms. While we've seen previous attempts from counterfeiters to mimic the 990 Pro or 980 Pro, sellers are getting creative and inventing new models. Novice or less-informed consumers may fall for these SSD scams.

Given Samsung's SSD nomenclature, the next SSD from the vendor, probably a PCIe 5.0 drive, could debut as the 1080 Pro. But for now, such an SSD doesn't exist, so if you see one on the market, avoid it at all costs.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • Order 66
    Almost sounds like it could be an Nvidia graphics card, but then again, the entire samsung 900 lineup of SSDs does as well. @Colif, you probably aren't surprised, but this is the first I've heard of fake internal SSDs. I am a bit confused at the 100GB single file copy test, even at 1GB/s it should be only 100 seconds, and not over 1000, correct?
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    Order 66 said:
    Almost sounds like it could be an Nvidia graphics card, but then again, the entire samsung 900 lineup of SSDs does as well. @Colif, you probably aren't surprised, but this is the first I've heard of fake internal SSDs. I am a bit confused at the 100GB single file copy test, even at 1GB/s it should be only 100 seconds, and not over 1000, correct?
    My guess is that the drive only has 128GB or 256GB of actual capacity — maybe 512GB (because there's only a single NAND chip) — certainly nowhere near 4TB. So even if it can put up some seemingly decent numbers in synthetic tests, real-world tasks like copying files are going to choke. Copying will hit both reads and writes, and at that point the controller may simply choke. The bogus firmware (assuming it reports 4TB?) would also run into issues. Real-world file transfer speeds are often half as fast, or even one fourth as fast, as what ATTO shows.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Order 66 said:
    Almost sounds like it could be an Nvidia graphics card, but then again, the entire samsung 900 lineup of SSDs does as well. @Colif, you probably aren't surprised, but this is the first I've heard of fake internal SSDs. I am a bit confused at the 100GB single file copy test, even at 1GB/s it should be only 100 seconds, and not over 1000, correct?
    The speed is irrelevant.
    There is not 4TB of drive space.

    But the likely 3rd rate microSD cards inside are typically slooooow.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    USAFRet said:
    The speed is irrelevant.
    There is not 4TB of drive space.

    But the likely 3rd rate microSD cards inside are typically slooooow.
    As noted in the text, there's a 96-layer Intel TLC NAND chip on these, with a Realtek controller. So it's not using microSD, but probably might as well be doing that.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    As noted in the text, there's a 96-layer Intel TLC NAND chip on these, with a Realtek controller. So it's not using microSD, but probably might as well be doing that.
    Can you elaborate, on the “might as well be doing that” part? I mean it is TLC NAND, so it should be fine, right?
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Order 66 said:
    Can you elaborate, on the “might as well be doing that” part? I mean it is TLC NAND, so it should be fine, right?
    NAND rejects from other companies, that just barely work.

    Not good enough to end up in a Samsung/Crucial/WD, and sold for pennies on the dollar.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    USAFRet said:
    NAND rejects from other companies, that just barely work.

    Not good enough to end up in a Samsung/Crucial/WD, and sold for pennies on the dollar.
    By barely work, do you mean slow read/write speeds, lower capacity, or both?
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Order 66 said:
    By barely work, do you mean slow read/write speeds, lower capacity, or both?
    Could be both.

    In any case, you're not getting a real 4TB for $43.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    USAFRet said:
    Could be both.

    In any case, you're not getting a real 4TB for $43.
    I guess I just don’t understand how faulty NAND could result in lower capacity. I understand how you could modify firmware to make something lower capacity appear higher capacity, but that’s the extent of my understanding of these fake SSDs.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Order 66 said:
    I guess I just don’t understand how faulty NAND could result in lower capacity. I understand how you could modify firmware to make something lower capacity appear higher capacity, but that’s the extent of my understanding of these fake SSDs.
    Yield per area.

    If a given area is supposed to hold 512GB, but it does not....that is rejected by the originator.

    And sold to an aggregator, who sells it to a second/third rate company...something like KingSpec.

    If it does not meet their low standards, it is then sold to someone farther down the chain, and ends up in junk like this.
    Reply