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Flea market shopper uncovers $1,500 worth of Samsung SSDs inside a $30 expansion card — Three 2TB 980 Pro drives were hidden beneath an Asus Hyper M.2 heatsink
Storage has gotten exponentially more expensive in the past year thanks to the ongoing component crisis. During times like these, scoring a deal feels extra special, especially when it's as bountiful as what @whateversunnyfinds (Sunny) stumbled upon in a local flea market. He hunted down a seemingly menial PCIe expansion card from Asus for $30, only to open it and find three Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSDs already slotted inside.
Each of those drives is worth at least $400 today, if not more. We found the 980 Pro 2TB listed for $444 on Amazon and $499 on Newegg, which makes three of them worth between $1,300 and $1,500 together. The expansion card holding them is an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 that retails for $79, so even if there were no SSDs inside, this would be a solid find. The card looks worn down but not quite beat up, while the drives honestly appear mint.
An expansion card like this allows you to install extra M.2 drives in your system by using an x16 slot usually meant for GPUs. Just three of the four slots on the card were populated, so there's a chance someone took out one SSD and threw this thing in the trash. If the original owner only ever installed three, they could've forgotten to check since the heatsink covers the drives underneath.
As for the thrifter, Sunny is from Kuwait City, and he frequents the largest flea market in the region called "Souq-al-Juma" — Arabic for "Friday Market." These open-air buildouts are common in Asian and Middle Eastern countries, but not all of them carry electronics. You usually have to visit the biggest venue on a designated day, since multiple flea markets are often propped up on the same day, to get the best, most relevant deals possible.
If you're lucky enough to score something similar, the NANDpocalypse might just feel a little less crushing. We don't know the exact internal condition or health of these 980 Pros, but 6TB for $30 is such an incredible find that you wouldn't even mind if they were roughed up. It's also the exact same capacity as another person found last year while dumpster diving, so technically they got a better deal, but those were 850 Pro SATA SSDs.
Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
