How drives get faked

Storage fraud is not one trick, it is four, and they get confused constantly. All four end with someone paying for capacity or endurance they never received.

1. Fake capacity: the drive lies about its size

The controller firmware announces more capacity to the operating system than the NAND actually holds. The file system believes it, so it keeps writing — and once writes pass the real end of the memory, the controller wraps around and overwrites sectors that already hold your files instead of returning an error. Nothing warns you. Old files simply come back corrupted.

The classic example is the “30 TB” M.2 external SSD sold for about $18 in 2022 on a third-party Walmart listing. It contained two 512 MB SD cards whose firmware reported 15 TB each, and the bus was throttled to 0.48 Gbps — which means the usual full-surface test would have needed roughly 500 days to reach the fake boundary (TechSpot).

2. Counterfeit branded drives: a real-looking drive that is not the real thing

A no-name board in a copied enclosure, carton, manual and stickers. A 1 TB Samsung 990 Pro analysed in Japan reported the correct model name, 2 TB capacity and a genuine-looking firmware string, and it passed the standard capacity test. It was caught by three things: it negotiated PCIe 3.0 instead of PCIe 4.0, it used a DRAM-less Maxio MAP1602 controller instead of Samsung’s own (the model number was printed on the board), and copying a ~400 GB file took 25 minutes at ~261 MB/s versus about 3.5 minutes on a genuine drive (TechSpot, Tom’s Hardware).

Synthetic benchmarks are worthless here. One of these fakes showed ~7,255/6,090 MB/s in CrystalDiskInfo and still took 25 minutes to move 400 GB. Copies, not benchmarks.

3. Used drives sold as new: the biggest category, and the least exotic

This is the one that catches careful buyers. Around a million hard drives pulled from Chia farming operations had their usage records deleted and were resold as new; a Seagate investigation with Malaysian authorities raided a workshop outside Kuala Lumpur in May 2025 that reset SMART values, cleaned, relabelled and repackaged used drives — sometimes relabelling a Barracuda as an IronWolf — and roughly 700 drives were seized (heise, Tom’s Hardware).

German readers of a hardware outlet bought 14 TB Seagate Exos drives sold as new. A quick SMART summary looked clean and the packaging was convincing. A deeper check showed 10,000 and 15,000 power-on hours on the first pair, 22,000 hours on two replacements from another shop, and after publication over fifty more readers reported the same, ranging from 15,000 to 36,000 hours — two 4 TB drives sat near 50,000 hours. Seagate’s answer was that these were OEM models, so the retail warranty did not apply anyway (Tom’s Hardware).

Then it got worse: investigators found the fraudsters had learned to alter the FARM reliability log too, so the check that caught the first batch no longer settles it on its own (Tom’s Hardware).

4. Marketing fakes: the drive is genuine, the numbers are not

No counterfeiting required. DRAM-less controllers with Host Memory Buffer sold as if they had a DRAM cache. Consumer QLC presented as TLC, which halves endurance. Endurance figures quoted as “TBW” without saying it scales with capacity, so a 4 TB drive looks like it lasts four times longer than the 1 TB version of the same model. See Choosing a drive for the numbers that survive this.

Where it arrives

• Third-party marketplace listings, at volume. Nikkei bought underpriced USB drives on Amazon platforms: half reported less capacity than advertised, one contained a microSD card where the memory chip should be, and Amazon listings for USB drives showed a 20% complaint rate about faked storage (Nikkei).
• eBay and similar, with hollow enclosures: a “$30 16 TB SSD” was a board, a 60 GB microSD card and weights glued in to feel heavy. The seller was banned and reopened within about an hour (TechSpot).
• Cheap cross-border marketplaces (AliExpress, Joom, Wish) have tolerated fake flash for about two decades (heise).
• “Renewed” listings, which are a seller guarantee, not a manufacturer warranty: 90 days for Acceptable/Good/Excellent, 365 days for Premium on Amazon Renewed (Amazon).
• High-capacity enterprise hard drives off unofficial channels — exactly the models the Chia farms unloaded.
• Budget brands during a NAND shortage, when used or reworked chips are the only silicon a small vendor can get (African Insider).

The tells that still work

1. The price. “16 TB for $30” is the entire scam. A genuine drive of that size costs hundreds. This remains the strongest single signal, and it is free.
2. The serial number, checked on the maker’s own site. Seagate will look up a serial for warranty status, Western Digital requires one for a claim. A cloned or nonsense serial — one fake reported 8888888888 — fails or does not match the label (Seagate).
3. The maker’s own tool. Samsung Magician flagged the cloned 990 Pro as “Non-Samsung” while it passed everything else (TechSpot).
4. The negotiated interface. A PCIe 4.0 model that trains at PCIe 3.0, or an x4 slot running at x2, is a red flag and a silent bandwidth halving.
5. A real copy, after the cache fills. Synthetic scores can be faked; sustained throughput under a large file is much harder to fake.
6. The board. Controller marking, presence or absence of the DRAM chip the retail model is specified with, PCB colour (blue where the genuine part is black), firmware naming that does not follow the vendor’s convention.
7. The packaging. Lower-resolution printing, an extra retail hanging header, a missing hanging tab, a different seal: counterfeiters match the box closely, so the differences are small.
8. The reported capacity and the drive’s own behaviour. A 1 TB drive reporting 1,099.5 GB, or one that will not even format, is a hard failure (Tom’s Hardware).
9. Age of the label. A manufacturing date more than about six months older than your purchase date, or a missing original barcode sticker.

None of these is sufficient alone, and one of them has already been defeated (the FARM log). Combine them, then run the full-surface test in Test a new drive.

If it happens to you

Keep the proof of purchase. Platform terms for marketplace sales put sale and fulfilment on the third-party seller, and buyers of the fraudulent Seagate drives were able to return them; platform and payment protection is the practical guarantee you actually have. Report the listing regardless — but do not assume a ban sticks, since sellers reopen accounts within the hour.

The short rules

• Buy from the brand’s authorised sellers, not from a marketplace storefront with no history.
• Treat a price far below market for the capacity as a scam, not a bargain.
• Check the serial against the manufacturer before you put data on the drive.
• Prefer vendors whose distribution is contractually bound: after the Seagate fraud, partners were required to source only from authorised distributors.
• Never assume “OEM” and “new” are the same thing, and never assume a retail box means retail warranty.
• Test the whole surface before you trust it with anything irreplaceable.