If you grew up in Spain, chances are your father or mother would have told you the famous phrase “buying cheap ends up being expensive” at some point. And it’s true, when you browse websites like AliExpress and come across a suspiciously discounted item, there’s usually a catch. Whether it’s poor component quality, stolen goods, or outright counterfeits, something is often amiss.
And that’s exactly what happened to a tech YouTuber named der8auer, who personally experienced the consequences of purchasing something at an unbelievably low price on AliExpress. One of his subscribers informed him that the popular Chinese e-commerce website was selling multiple units of a supposed Samsung NVMe SSD for just 40 euros, which caught the techtuber’s attention, but also raised suspicions.
And several things were off about this situation. The first is the price: NVMe SSDs are expensive (very expensive). Depending on the model, brand, and generation of the device, 4TB NVMe drives rarely drop below 200 euros, so a supposed Samsung offer for 40 euros is, at the very least, suspicious. But to make matters worse, the “Samsung 980 EVO” model featured in the offer doesn’t even exist in the brand’s catalog.
Once der8auer had the SSD in his hands, he began to investigate and quickly discovered that the SSD manufacturer had erased any trace of the controller chip. Later, he tested the device using various system information and benchmarking tools, and both Windows and CrystalDisk indicated that it allegedly had a capacity of 3.72TB.
After a grueling capacity testing process that took nearly 24 hours, der8auer confirmed that the supposed 4TB Samsung SSD did not have the advertised capacity and, “at best,” it would be a 1TB SSD from a brand that, as one can deduce, is not Samsung. Indeed, der8auer had fallen victim to a scam.
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