I would love to see a follow up video on how Ali Express deals with your complaint, what actions they take against the scammers, etc.

The thing I hate about these scams isn't that people fall for them, it's the resources wasted to make these scam products. From the metal and plastics used in the casing and electronics to the energy used in manufacturing.

P.S. The 10TB+ USB SSD scam is sold everywhere from Amazon to Ebay to Walmart, it's farfrom an AliExpress issue

Thanks der8auer for another great video! I really appreciate all you have taught me here on this channel.

It's kind of funny that they haven't changed the way they do this type of scam for 10+ years...

Great video, thanks for looking into it and helping out the community!

You're a good person, Roman, and that's why any of us watch your content. Never quit.

Excellent video, I like how you go into depth and try to figure out these scams and what they use, Well done! You earned a subscriber.

one thing ive learned long time ago, is never buy storage in ali

AliExpress scams always make for great entertaining video. Would love to see more AliExpress scam videos in the future - or other oddities you typically don't see on everyday PC market

It's actually quite common to see the removal of IC markings on components that are purchased from the grey-market, rather than them being removed by the OEM/scammer themself. This is often just to remove date/batch codes so that they can't be easily traced back to a supplier.

I love videos like this, I've seen those drives before and wondered what's inside. No idea why they try to go so ridiculously fake capacities, surely they would con more people saying like 2TB for €40, not 64TB! I would love to see a follow up video on how Ali Express deals with your complaint, what actions they take against the scammers, etc.

Thanks for the video!..Fake products is also becoming a real problem today

You should be using the fake flash test program, it has a quick test mode that doesn't need to write the whole drive. It writes a small file every 1 MB or so apart, instead of filling up every single sector. It is pretty reliable at quickly testing these kinds of drives, even at slow speeds.

As someone who has bought sketchy MicroSD cards off Wish before I'm very familiar with H2testw and how LONG it can take. I appreciate your time making this video.

The firmware VA001CBN reveals a bunch of similar drives with about 128GB capacity, but the flash chip markings (lol, the random mixed ones on the "pro") are not Intel nor Micron (the main problem is the missing capacity after 29F). But if you unsolder these and put them into a nand programmer, it should read out the ID of the chip - to tell what it actually is inside. Ask around at some data recovery companies if they could ID the chip with their tools electronically.

You're much more brave than me lol. I wouldn't even plug these into my PC. Who knows what kind of ransonware comes on some of these 😂

Note for the external drives with microSD cards, these days they use a controller that reads some config off the beginning of the card (hence why you were prompted to format, because it's the config and not the MBR at the start) to set the capacity and USB identifiers. If you put in a card without that config, it works like a normal SD card reader. The controller is off the shelf, the only trick is they can be configured by the card. The microSD card tends to be real capacity (when you use it in a regular reader), just low quality.

It's good to spread awareness about it As a trained eye I instantly recognise these cases, there's dozens of them with different branding

Great video. I also avoid "retail partner" sales on Amazon, Bestbuy etc. If it doesn't say "sold by Amazon", I'm suspicious. In the case of Bestbuy, I always avoid things designated "marketplace seller." There may be times when you can afford to take a chance, but be prepared to have to deal with a counterfeit. When it comes to usb devices, ssd drives, that sort of thing, I avoid them completely. It's also a good idea to have testing programs, such as the ones you used.

Thank you, sir, for your information with regards to these 'fake' products.

I really really love that little NVMe/SATA M.2 data extraction gadget you featured!!!! Awesome idea!

This happened to me a few years ago. I bought a 2TB external drive, turned out to be 80GB drive. AliExpress returned my money immediately without having to return the drive AND the store disappeared a few days later. :) EDIT: Also, two weeks ago I was trying to buy a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB. I tried ScAmazon, BestBuy Canada, and Staples, all of them wanted around $200 plus $150 for shipping ( ! ! ! ) Yes, I live in a remote area, but checking shipping rates it only costs $12 to mail me the parcel. So, I reluctantly looked to AE for one. Found a 980Pro for $203 CAN$ with free shipping. I made sure that the company had at least 1000 sales and a rating of 95% or higher positive feedback. Got my drive 3 days ago and everything is 100% legit, and registered with Samsung for warranty purposes. :)

I still dont understand why some people buy these things thinking they are going to get a good deal. You just cant get something for nothing. These scammers steal peoples hard earned money.. Thank You for showing this. Love your videos.

Ah good, another episode of 'Engineer debunks stuff on Aliexpress'. Please, continue.

Thank you for a great review - excellent job.

Yeah, I bought one of those 40Tb USB SSDs, sort of expected it to be bogus, which it was. It came up as being "there" as a connected device, but writing files into it got progressively slower . . . and slower . . . and slower, and finally died in the process. Apparently they have some software trick to make it look like xxTb, but in reality, a few Gb is what's there, and basically unusable. Amazingly, I actually got a refund (from Wish) though it took several weeks. Quite fun watching your video . . . thanks.

Nice to see OEM surplus boxes being put to 'good' use... The same sort of scams occurred shortly after USB storage drives (pen drives) hit the market... very common in China...

There are plenty of people out there who are clueless when it comes to this. They won’t know what TB means or what makes the legit products so much more expensive. Imagine an old man who has been a carpenter all his life. To him, a hammer is a hammer and dealing with all the technical stuff is way too complicated.

You're very knowledgeable on the matter of tech. Hope all your other videos are as good and with the same translation.

Thanks for doing this! I was looking at getting one of the external ssd for my x box that is in my semi truck. Guess I’ll just get a western digital black for it.

It's nice of them to hot glue the SD card in, that's more care than some OEMs of non scam hardware give.

There are multiple variants of those fake 980/990 Pros. If you deal with the retail versions of those SSDs long enough, you can immediately spot the fake ones right from the packaging. I believe there are even fake 870 Evo as well (seen the packaging, the text is way off from the real ones).

New sub from Canada, PS love how your cat's just laying on your table and not caring about what's going on around him/her lol

Thank you for sharing this info! Very interesting.

I bought an external HDD also, and found that it had weights inside even. Crazy lengths they go to sell these

To get full speed with these drives you need to plug in a USB mounted SC/AM adapter, it opens up the limitation. Only now for $50.

I've been into this stuff for quite awhile now and when I started to see these "So Called" good deals pop up I already had a clue to what was going on and refused to waste my time and money on this stuff. Comparing price to size is Very telling and common sense will tell most people that this is nothing but a SCAM! If Aliexpress will allow this to go on then use your common sense and Don't buy this junk!! I think it's called To Good To Be TRUE😉. I thank everyone and YOU for showing how crooked a lot of these sellers are!

you're one of my favorite tech youtuber der8auer, keep it up👍, i like when youtubers show fake or rip off products so more people are aware of them so they don't get duped or scammed, watch out for lack company logo and even mispellings in company logo, test it on asystem you don't really use or don't have important content on it and check if its specs especially in storage match the description of its box on your system specs and even if the system reads its for example 64 GB on the box or even its specs run tests on it to see that if it even have the correct storage internally cause sometimes these scammers write software on it that gives u the wrong specs and when you use tools to verify its real specs it might read differently but yes watch for lack of misspelled or not labeled products by the manufacturer product you planned on getting

Good review, and thank you for the effort to spread this awareness about ssd scam, and also, that's is one cute orange tabby cat :D

AliExpress = Chinese scammer heaven.

Not only does a 980 Evo not exist. As far as I'm aware (I was looking for one a few weeks ago), Samsung doesn't even make 4TB NVME drives. The highest they go is 2TB. Western Digital makes 4TB NVME drives, but not Samsung. The only "4TB EVO" drives Samsung currently makes are 2.5 inch SATA drives.

I gotta say, I am impressed with the scammer's modifications to the controller to slow down write rates. That avoids getting an outright write error and gives them a way to extend the scam by creating as much confusion for the user as possible. Since SSDs, and NVME drives in particular, allocate blocks dynamically (literally they use a key,data scheme internally where the 'key' is basically the block number), it is possible to make the SSD appear to be as large as you like. And it will even work up until the point where the flash fills up. Since vendors put varying amounts of extra flash in real drives, the "capacity" is just a programming parameter in the controller, completely independent from the actual amount of physical flash available. The scammers programmed the parameter to be super huge and then it looks like they must have implemented a write-slow-down feature to delay actually filling up the true capacity of the flash, preventing the end-user realizing that the device is a scam. Impressive. -Matt

Great info. Thank you bro

exFat is actually quite common for an SSD / external device. NTFS can be inefficient / not supported by other systems.

15:52 tells it all on the screen print its a Realtek demo board with 128GB. I got 2 of these a couple months ago, Ali express gave a full refund.

I'm amazed that you plugged that crop into your computer 🖥.

Nice video, well done, thanks for sharing it with us :)

I think for those M.2 drives they took some generic drive and reprogrammed the controller so that the speed would approach 0 as the drive reached its real capacity.

These SSD scams were so prevalent in Facebook ads. As quickly as they showed up, they were taken down. It's shameful how much effort these scammers go through to rob people when they could go to making actual contributions instead.

I like this kind of work (investigative) good job.

Great video 👏👏 keep up the good work u save people alot of money 💰💰

It's pretty standard for these scam drives to use a generic USB enclosure, from what I've seen from other people. Also the controller has a hacked firmware, that makes the storage device identify as a specific size. What it does is just to recycle data when it gets full, so it overwrites itself. Which makes it look like it's working if you put a file that is smaller than the actual storage capacity of the SD card inside. So if you put in something larger, it will seem corrupted. Sometimes they put some weights inside as well to make it feel like it is a legit device. So at least you get a "free" and crappy microSD card! ;P

The moment i saw the transfer speed of the 64TB drive i got the feeling it was just an enclosure with a small flash card inside. I've never used AliExpress and likely never will, I tend to go to established tech retailers even if it means paying a small premium for peace of mind.

Thank you for this informative video!

At least the first one isn't pernicious to the point of writing over the old data. You may well find out the scam before it bites you hard. Very cool of you to do this.

Goes to show why we must "de risk" our dealings with China. Don't buy and you won't get scammed! If it says Made in China, buyer beware. Look elsewhere or do without.

The funny thing is that I actually bought a 64GB MicroSDXC card from AliExpress for my Nintendo Switch. Price was around what you'd expect, and the performance was also as advertised (around 10x the speed of the product Roman actually received, lmao). It wasn't a deal that sounded too good to be true though. 😅

Great timing for me on this video as I was looking at some of the NVME drives on Alibaba, I know they are fake and are using old chips and controllers. With the outright lie of capacity and speed is enough to detour from any purchase. Then with anything is the reliability of this garbage. Should have learned my lesson from the SSD I bought a while back that would pop in and out of Windows and was really slow. Couldn't even use for file transferring as it would just stop reading after a bit. Good Video!

The effort you put opening those things made me subscribe

Honestly after seeing all of these scams I'd just have bought a 1TB NVMe SSD, put it in a USB-C enclosure and call it a day. (if you're planning on doing this remember to make sure the SSD has DRAM cache or else it might be using HMB that does not work over USB - it does work over thunderbolt though if it has access to PCIe lanes)

Kudos to you, buying these fakes before they ended up in the hands of those who wouldn't have a clue.

Good thing you have a test bench, I would be greatly worried plugging this in where it can inject malware and whatnot.

You have to be careful when plug those fake disk. They usually come with malware hidden within the hard drive partition or within the chip itself.

They're add descriptions are almost always very cryptic, Be very careful of the fine print. They are very slow in shipping and in cases like this that is good, gives you time to cancel. Of products I have gotten from them , finally, have been OK and work. But I feel you are very correct in this case and cancelled the one I ordered. Good work sir.

Fun video, suggestion for a followup would be to test aliexpress drives that seems legit. I got a Fanxiang S500PRO 2TB nvme drive for around 70 euro, I did try to test it as much as possible and it looks legit, even has clamied speeds and size so I use it as a game drive, still cheap for 2TB I think.

Be wary of buying SD cards from Amazon. Even ones sold by Amazon are fake.

On Aliexpress you don't get scammed, you get what you deserve.

I never thought I'd hear the words "Scammed" and "AliExpress" togehter in the same sentence! lol j/k That's about all I expect. Thanks for the video!

Thanks U from France ,i'm just wondered if it was interesting to buy this kind of SSD in Aliexpress ,you gave me the answer 😅😅😅

Who would have thought that a Chinese website would attempt to scam their customers?

i try to not support authoritarian regimes, so i avoid products made in china, imported from china

Greetings from Sydney... I love ya cat bro... Also good review 👍😉

Thanks for this great video.

Wow! Very interesting! I'm in Japan and ordered some batteries for Sony A7C. They came a month after I ordered. And not only that! In the photo, they advertise 2 battery sets and in reality, it was one single battery. Now I'm worried because when I plugged in the battery, my camera said it was not a reliable product. Still, it works but I wondered if it's going to damage my camera.

apologies. only just now, after all these years, subbed.

Should’ve went with crucial as I use crucial for my ram and solid-state drives and they’re on point and reasonably priced on Amazon. I was able to put 64 gigs of RAM laptop and extra 1TB SSD in my laptop for $120 for all 3

For the external usb drives, one would just have to flash/hack the ssd/SD card controller to show a false number. It's similar to gpu flashing where for example a Nvidia GTS 450 shows up as a RTX 2060.

Thank You Roman for showing others how this SCAM is done. I tell a lot of people but im unknown lol

Hats off to your efforts.

seagate years ago use to make drives for backups called backups + that is where the box came from. The drives were HDD back then as well

Perfect!

Always make sure you are purchasing from reputable vendors, especially if you are thinking about backing up your collection of CD's.

Flash drives, rechargeable lithium batteries and power bank capacities are some of the biggest online scams. It's worth doing a little research ahead of time to find out what the average price is for these things.

As a very young boy I learned that no matter WHAT it is, unless you're at a garage sale or yard sale (those are big here in the States) most likely if it sounds too good to be true, IT IS.

exFAT is normal for larger capacity drives also on external drives so to be compatible with Windows, Mac and most Linux distros while internal drives seem to go with NTFS. It also goes with exFAT as the seller doesn't know if you will plug in and leave it or move it between systems with different OSes. exFAT was made to be the most compatible file system instead of one of the high security file systems like NTFS is trying to be. In that using exFAT makes sense even though it rarely is on a SSD as most SSDs are internal not external drives.

The one I'm most curious about is the NVME drives. What did they put in there? It works as an NVME drive. But it slows down so drastically the capacity must also be fake. And if it is, how did they do it?

Great video. Samsung m.2 drives are awsome. As far as I'm aware Samsung is the only major company that hasn't a 4Tb drive on the market.

Interesting because I recently got the same brand only it was the 1080 version and was perfect. It came up correctly and has correctly allocated the correct size when I formatted a sector for EXT4 and one for NTFS. It showed up correctly on Crystal Mark 9.2.3 Aoi Edition x64. Crystal Mark came back with Health Status good (100%). I guess the 1080 is not a scammed version.

Why would you even buy an SSD or RAM from AliExpress? You had it coming. 😂

I was waiting for this

Thanks for the great video.

i love the orange cat just chilling 😻

A few years ago, in Turkey, I bought a beautifully made (and beautifully detailed) Nike belt for next to nothing. I was very happy with it, but it had one slight problem. According to a friend of mine, who, managing a local Footlocker, had a good knowledge of Nike's product range, Nike, at the time, did not manufacture belts.

Nice to see we have at least something technological still here in Finland

"todays video is powered by..." thats one way to spin "paid for by" which is what used to be the common tagline spoken

You should also watch out for smartphone replacement batteries with significantly higher capacities than the standard types 🙄 ( 4800 mAh vs. 3000 mAh in my case 🙄 - but it turned out that it was only around 10 % better in a video loop test than my 2.5 years old battery ). Maybe it would be a great idea, if we could make some sort of independent blacklist site, where unhappy customers could report these '"Aliexpress" type scam companies and their false products in various categories, so that we could all help each others knowing which companies and which products to avoid?

I'm surprised he's never heard or read about these drives and how they work before, they're quite common. They basically have a small SD card in them, like he said, but they're made so that they copy over itself over and over to make it seem like it can write 60TB of data. Any data written will of course actually get re-written on top of it and will be completely corrupt and unusable.

Aliexpress customer service is so efficient and effective (but not fast or easy) that you will get your money back and most probably the counterfeit item. Being polite and patient and very descriptive with your problem as attaching meaningful photos of parcel and item to your claim works wonders. Not a big deal at all. Broken or wrong item etc.

you are the man!!! THANK YOU!!!! 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍