Had the same issue with a Crucial drive from amazon. looked just like the real thing but for some small discrepancies.
Performed like an absolute dog and the SMART data was waaaay off.
amazon just refunded me the whole amount and I pulled it apart to see what was inside:
https://imgur.com/a/NUSuuEh
ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011) or Samsung (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that.
In general I am afraid to buy storage devices except directly from the vendor at the moment. I've heard that there's also lots of fraudulent HDDs being sold with botched SMART data, even on Amazon, even marked as "New", even sold by Amazon. Scary proposition unless you're dying to test out your RAID array redundancy.
I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay. No one bothers to fake them and they last longer than the consumer ones even if they are a few years old.
eMag is full of fake SSDs. Don’t ever buy from sellers, only if sold by eMag directly or from a reputable seller that you know. And it’s not only SSDs. This has been going on for many years and yes, when you give in to promotions like 70-80% the price of an original you usually get a fake.
I’d also like to point out that those Kingston A400’s are notoriously terrible and had a firmware bug that caused the behaviour you describe if you don’t update it before it happens.
I purchased 10 genuine new from a verified vendor and 6 had to be RMA’d within the first year.
I recently got a new 4TB Seagate drive from the biggest computer/electronics retailers here, it was shipped in the worst way I've ever seen a hard drive shipped. An anti-static bag, inside of one of those slightly padded envelopes you get when you order an Arduino from AliExpress. Naturally, it had a big dent on one of the corners, and it started clicking the moment I plugged it in.
It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
I recently bought two SSDs from Chinese brands I had never heard before. My thinking being that they were reasonably priced (a bit cheaper than name brands but not by much) and that probably no-one would fake no-name brands. Reviews seemed to be mostly genuine as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so far they seem to work fine, we'll see.
At the start of the eCommerce business, people flocked to Amazon because they had trouble trusting smaller retailers.
These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon).
So now I shop at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.
> The main problem now is that the product I bought now appears as a completely different product on that site, which is baffling, how can a product that’s been sold be “updated” with having a completely new photo, title, description, etc (now it’s basically a car Bluetooth adapter for 5 euros), which makes me unable to start the return process.
It's to buy fake reviews. They "sell" something very cheap so fake reviewers can buy it and write a positive review. Once done, they change the page back to the actual scam.
By the way, you should contact Kingston and notify them that you have a fraudulent drive. Chances are they'll exchange it for a new drive so they can investigate it.
The best SSD purchases of my life was the last Intel X-25E (64GB 45nm SLC with 100.000 writes per bit from 2011) I found on ebay ~2021.
I ordered one first expecting it to be used or fake, but the packaging looked good (original and untampered) and the Intel disk software said it had only factory number of read/writes so I went all in and bought all the disks they had...
30x at $100 instead of the original $1.000 price tag. Still $3.000 sounds like an aweful lot when it's only 64GB disks, but I know how it feels when your OS drive corrupts and that's not something I want to keep experiencing over and over every 5 (if you are lucky) years.
Now with a few (24/7 operation) years under their belt I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".
This also happens a lot on AliExpress most storage devices are fake. Some 64gb flash drives, sd cards or 320gb 2.5 mobile hdds are okay. But you should run f3 test on any new drive you buy.
I've bought two counterfeit drives on Amazon -- one in 2024, and one in 2025. One sold by Amazon. Another I thought I was buying from Amazon directly but came from a seller.
They looked completely, COMPLETELY legit. Enough that I initially doubted OEM support when the drives failed and I contacted them and they pointed out my drive's serial number doesn't even match the legit's format. They weren't even relabeled from a lower tier model.
The saving grace is that I have Prime, so getting refunds was relatively easy after a couple quick back and forths.
Not just fakes that but I'm also finding consumer ones seem to die a lot...
I ended up building a NAS from 2nd hand enterprise SSD plus optanes. Cheap, fast & resilient.
Normally not so keen on 2nd hand storage, but the combination of enterprise (tons of endurance) plus full mirrored is an acceptable risk to me. And (also mirrored) optanes for metadata and small files means everything feels super snappy
I have bought like 20+ used enterprise ssds from taobao (for my various PCs). Only a single one dies because I forgot to add the heat-sink. I think the most important thing is how trustworthy the seller is.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadamazon just refunded me the whole amount and I pulled it apart to see what was inside: https://imgur.com/a/NUSuuEh
quite annoying, though also amusing.
Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
I purchased 10 genuine new from a verified vendor and 6 had to be RMA’d within the first year.
It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon).
So now I shop at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.
It's to buy fake reviews. They "sell" something very cheap so fake reviewers can buy it and write a positive review. Once done, they change the page back to the actual scam.
By the way, you should contact Kingston and notify them that you have a fraudulent drive. Chances are they'll exchange it for a new drive so they can investigate it.
I ordered one first expecting it to be used or fake, but the packaging looked good (original and untampered) and the Intel disk software said it had only factory number of read/writes so I went all in and bought all the disks they had...
30x at $100 instead of the original $1.000 price tag. Still $3.000 sounds like an aweful lot when it's only 64GB disks, but I know how it feels when your OS drive corrupts and that's not something I want to keep experiencing over and over every 5 (if you are lucky) years.
Now with a few (24/7 operation) years under their belt I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
(the title is also ~p~fun)
Quickly spot-check any USB mass storage drive for fraudulent deliberately missing storage.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
They looked completely, COMPLETELY legit. Enough that I initially doubted OEM support when the drives failed and I contacted them and they pointed out my drive's serial number doesn't even match the legit's format. They weren't even relabeled from a lower tier model.
The saving grace is that I have Prime, so getting refunds was relatively easy after a couple quick back and forths.
I ended up building a NAS from 2nd hand enterprise SSD plus optanes. Cheap, fast & resilient.
Normally not so keen on 2nd hand storage, but the combination of enterprise (tons of endurance) plus full mirrored is an acceptable risk to me. And (also mirrored) optanes for metadata and small files means everything feels super snappy