This is probably one of the best bootlegs we've seen.
In the year 2026, when big-bad AI suddenly consumes all the world's memory and storage because a group of Chinese companies says so. For GPUs and NPU that haven't been made. Going into datacenters that haven't been built. To get a net-profit return on this theory, resulting in the entire GDP of approximately five Americas. Now, more than ever, there are people looking for a good deal on storage and RAM, and the market is jammed with bootleg storage devices available on Aliexpress with deals that are too good to be true. Which they are! For the lulz, we got a USB stick 5 years ago that claimed to be 1TB. It turns out that after you stored 64mb onto this thumb drive, everything else went corrupt.
This is because of a technique that allows people to fake the storage ID on the chip. So you load up something that costs you pennies with an ID of an expensive storage device. Sell it on eBay and close the account before the buyer could even file a fraud complaint, only for eBay to pick up the tab.
We have a friend who goes by the name of "Dakilla" who slid this Samsung 870 Evo SSD drive over to me. We have to say this is the most interesting bootleg we've seen. Bootleg 870 Evo's have been covered by other YouTubers. But this one in particular is on another level.
Read on if you care.
Un-Re-Killed-Your-Boner-YouTube-Unboxer?
Not hiding the serial number on this one. It's already guilty!
Now, unlike a lot of the bootlegs that YouTubers got on these solid-state drives, this one actually had a serial number. It's wrong, of course. But it's actually there!
Looking at the back of the box, it had all of the right stuff on it except for the store hook going off to a place like Best Buy, where they should sell it retail. So, kudos to this bootlegger for using a professional UV Jet printer in order to make the box right.
As my friend purchased about 16 of these for a home lab file server, which is out of the scope of this article. The very first thing he did was go to Samsung's website and register to get that 5-year warranty.
Now, we DID use the serial number and serial/model off the hard drive itself. It's the same as the box. Which bad news, the model has a "BW" at the end, which doesn't exist as a selectable item. If you go with either of the two suggested models, it complains about the serial number right away.
Needless to say, after some back and forth with the eBay buyer (who listed these items as NEW and an official Samsung vendor in the states), suddenly these drives that were gotten for $80 a unit are now magically FREE because the vendor didn't want to provide a shipping tag to push it all the way back to China. We know what you're thinking. This is an eBay vendor in the United States. Why ship to China? Well! He lied about his location on eBay! and eventually defaulted on the entire auction.
More free bootleg shit to investigate further!
Inside the drive.
One of the things that YouTubers kept saying is to open your drive, and you should see Samsung labels all over the IC chips for its authenticity. To which, at those ends, the YouTuber says this. But never shows you. We will!
Alright, first things first, as we have no warranty to void, there's no fucks given while we unbox our iPhone repair kit and grab a T4 bit to undo the 3 screws on the bottom of this case. After those screws were gone, popping the circuit board out of the case was easy peasy.
As we look at this board. We have more questions than answers:
- Dig the style points by just piling up all of the QA holographic stickers of what appears to be a spiralgraph on just one chip, and not all of them?
- PFF94MB - Google that and you get just about nothing?
- HHD LED busy signal light in the lower right-hand corner? WHY!?!?!? Oh, it lights up if you plug it in. But why an LED in an enclosed case?
Flip it over.
Not much to really look at the back of this board, except more silkscreen numbers that don't really match anything, and an ODD number of chips on this system. Perhaps this really isn't a 1TB but a 768 Gig(or even megabyte) bootleg device?
I guess only one way to find out.
Plug it in.
Now. Sketchy ass drive that claims to be Samsung but really isn't on the inside? We're not taking chances on this. We're going to boot up a non-Internet-connected Ubuntu box booting off of USB and pass the following Linux commands over it.
smartctl -x /dev/sda
Pull a detailed report of this drive. which read at the time the drive was only operating for a few hours, and that it's 100 percent healthy.. okay..
badblocks -b 4096 -w -v -o bads-sda.txt /dev/sda
Let's perform a badblock check, verifying 0's alternating 0's and 1' and random write. a 3x pass on the entire drive, taking hours to perform. Passed.. wow.. Okay.
smartctl -t long /dev/sda
Do a smartCTL long after writing to the entire drive. After a while, it passed. Again..
I then decided to format this drive and load it up with a single one-hour movie that changed the codec to lossless FFV1, so a 1080p 1-hour-long movie would magically eat up 100GB of space.
Don't feel like breaking the law? Take your phone, walk around the city recording that for an hour at 30fps 1080p. You'll achieve the same results as a 1-hour film.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v ffv1 -c:a pcm_s32le output.mkv
Now, the neat thing about exploding a previously compressed movie into FFV1 is two things.
- It allows you to index quickly throughout 100GB of data to check if integrity begins to fail.
- It also stresses the drive as the throughput will be much higher than playing the MP4 all compressed and by itself.
I ran this command about 9 times. Enough to fill the Samsung Evo 870. Each movie started and finished perfectly with zero corruption.
But what about Microsoft?
Just because we've sworn off 'the slop' as my daily driver, we still have an ISO with it loaded. Why not reload this box with a Windows 11 OS and try some hard disk utilities that way? That way, whatever virus is on the boot sector of this drive can REALLY fuck up this PC. Er.. We also loaded some virus checkers, and they all came back clean.
Crystal Info Smartcheck agrees with Ubuntu's smartctl. And as you can see, we were writing to this drive a lot. We were really pushing this drive to corrupt any/all files on it.
What about its speed?
Well, I don't have a legit Samsung Evo 870 to compare it to. But sequential reads/writes are getting close to the wall of SATA, but the random access sucks a little.
The verdict?
This is probably the best bootleg we've played with. Do we trust this drive as much as an official Samsung EVO 870 in a datacenter environment? No. It's absolutely as-is and without warranty. But why go through all of the work of giving you a legit 1TB drive when it's well.. Not?
Part of it is reputation. When you get a Samsung, you get the assurance that the drive will last for a while, even under the most hostile conditions. People pay top dollar for them. So our guess is the drives we got were probably destined for an industrial solution, such as billboards or kiosk computers loaded with 1TB of advertisements to blast across Manhattan or Tokyo. Except when the company ran its QA, these drives were probably failing left and right. Resulting in a business deal going through.
This company couldn't sell their drive as-is because chances are they couldn't recoup their cost. So, they just repacked these as Samsung drives to give the money they wanted out of it, hoping no one would ever go to Samsung's site to register the drive for warranty, and just blindly throw these into a data center array until months later, they will fail.
Potential uses?
Basically, use cases would include something such as temporary storage, where you do not value the 1TB of data that you are about to load on this drive.
- Scratch disk for video editing - Using the ffmpeg command above to make everything lossless (and very big), editing video at 4k in open source programs such as OpenShot(Clearnet Address) becomes very tolerable without even using the preview function provided. If the drive explodes. No problem. You can recreate the master MOV or MP4 files that you uploaded from your phone back into FFV1 onto ANOTHER 1TB drive and keep editing.
- Torrents - NAUGHTY! WE KNOW! But Linux ISOs are big. You're going to MD5 hashcheck to verify it's not corrupt anyway. Why not use a temporary download folder and save wear and tear on your OS drive?
- Portable Drives - Reguardless if you choose a platter or even a known SSD, portable drives get banged up good during travel. Minus well, wreck something you don't care about.
Although you could easily load an OS onto this bootleg drive (We did with Windows 11 because, well, we just don't care.) But to use this drive as a daily driver really is playing russian roulette with your data.
Final thoughts.
Normally, when it comes to bootleg tech, one isn't as lucky as we are (or my friend in this case)! In the worst case, it's a tin box filled with rocks for weight. Another thing is that many YouTubers end up finding only a 64GB SSD drive marked up as 1TB. In a very malicious case, A capacitor tied to the power rail can blow up your system if it's a malicious bootleg. Or it's 64GB drive, AND it's actually filled with malware right from the people making it, hoping you'll plug it in right away and make money for them mining bitcoin. In this case. The company that made the 1TB wanted Samsung's money without the Samsung commitment of a 5-year warranty. That's all there is to it.
If we didn't have some lab PCs. Where we'd laugh if they got destroyed. We probably would've put these drives into the shredder once we got our money back from the eBay vendor. It's just too dangerous to take down a PC you use as a daily driver. Just use common sense if you want to fuck around and find out M'kay?
M'kay..
That's what server said.
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