On Amazon, sellers regularly lure with great offers. An 8 TB SSD for 80 euros sounds genius, but you should definitely not buy it.
Every gamer might need additional storage. Modern games are getting larger and require more storage space on your conventional hard drive or SSD. Some sellers are currently offering a particularly tempting deal on Amazon: An SSD with 8 TB storage for under 100 euros.
However, you should stay away from these “offers”. There is a scam behind it, as some YouTubers and users explain.
8 TB SSD storage is currently available on Amazon
What great offers are these? You will find plenty of great deals around SSDs and USB sticks on Amazon:
- Currently, you can find several of these “offers” listed directly on Amazon.
- In some cases, the product is shipped directly by Amazon, in others through a third-party vendor.
- Advertising is done with similar images and either with 8 or 16 TB of storage for under 100 euros.
YouTubers and experts warn and explain how the fake behind such products works
How does the fake behind such products work? USB sticks with 1 TB of storage for 20 euros are not uncommon. However, such products often only contain 32 GB of storage (via SSD-Tester.de). The online magazine explains:
- The components are often bought for very little money. A memory controller and a memory card cost only a few euros.
- Subsequently, the memory controller on the SSD is modified by the fraudsters.
- When you connect such a device to your computer, it will indeed display 8 TB of storage. However, this information is incorrect.
- With the free tool H2testw, you can quickly check if the product can write the correct amount of data to an SSD or USB stick.
- As long as you do not use the real capacity of the device, the manipulation goes unnoticed.
The YouTuber DIY Geek ordered the SSD from Amazon for 80 euros and subsequently disassembled it (via youtube.com): Instead of an M.2 SSD, he finds a microSD card with 64 GB inside, which is stuck to the memory controller.
Similarly, Krazy Ken’s Tech Talk refers to the problems with such products (via youtube.com). The devices resemble popular products from Samsung and others, but inside only an SD card and a modified memory controller are present. The modified firmware then ensures that you see completely unrealistic numbers.
Both YouTubers and the online magazine clearly warn against such products. In the worst case, your data that you want to store on such a device could be lost.
We have asked a manufacturer on Amazon for a statement regarding the cheap products.
What else is strange? If you take a look at the currently best deal for a 20 TB SSD, you will notice that the price is at least 322 euros. If you also look at the general offers, such as those on Geizhals, you will find that you won’t pay less than 300 euros for such a large SSD anywhere.
After this information, you should be rather skeptical about such offers on Amazon.
Additionally, there are very few reviews and these reviews are also very bad because the first customers have already fallen for the offer, as they themselves write. Furthermore, the seller is very new on Amazon and has few or no reviews.
More fake products: A similar case of fake hardware also exists in the graphics card sector. A gamer recently discovered such a graphics card and stumbled upon the “notorious” fake GPU. You should rather avoid it today:
