According to Tom’s Hardware following on Japanese outlet Akiba PC Hotline!‘s recent report, 2026 has proven how far counterfeit SSDs have come, with fake versions of the Samsung 990 PRO SSDs now mimicking not just branding, but even performance characteristics closely enough to fool unsuspecting buyers.
Taking a look at the packaging, and if you’ve dealt with fake stuff in the past, you’d be thinking that this is a genuine product. No – it’s not. Counterfeiters have refined the box design to near perfection, but there’s an inclusion of a retail hanging tab on the fake packaging, which the real one doesn’t have.
Labels are super close as well, and if you pry open the parts to expose the hardware underneath, you’ll see the Maxio MAP1602 controller instead of Samsung’s in-house unit. And sure enough, the MAP1602 is said to deliver competitive sequential speeds close to genuine drives.
And unlike the authentic 990 PRO utilizing LPDDR4 DRAM and Samsung’s 176-layer V-NAND TLC flash, the counterfeit lacks DRAM entirely due to the controller’s limitations. The NAND type is unconfirmed but is widely suspected to be lower-grade QLC, a cost-saving move typical of counterfeit products.
Well, if one wants to confirm if their SSDs are real, chances are they will plug them into their system and test them with CrystalDiskMark or something. But the fake drive reported back 7,255 MB/s and 6,090 MB/s in sequential tests, which are not far off the official figures of 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s for the genuine 1TB model.
However, Random 4K is closer to real-world usage, especially at heavy queue depths, and sure enough, the fake drive drops to roughly half of what the real Samsung controller can achieve. Sustained write performance also took a big tank once the cache was exhausted, dropping to around 100 MB/s, while the genuine model maintained speeds closer to 1,500 MB/s.
So the main takeaway? Be vigilant when purchasing from a less well-known seller, if the deal is too good to be true. Also, you can still rely on the Samsung Magician software, as it can authenticate genuine drives and restrict access to key features when a counterfeit is detected.
