SSD Maker Unknowingly Sends Counterfeit SSD to Reviewer

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If you own a KingFast SSD, you might want to read this article. Apparently the company got a batch of counterfeit memory that ended up being used in drives that were shipped to customers and, in this case, a review site.

This report involves the SSD manufacturer KingFast, as well as Micron and OCZ with respect to NAND flash memory. It is our opinion that all three companies are victims of this occurrence and had no knowledge of, or intent to produce or distribute the counterfeit SSD received. All three companies have been contacted for background and assistance and have been very accommodating in assisting with this report.
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It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. I knew that SD cards of all flavors are heavily prone to counterfeiting, flash drives as well. It's particularly unfortunate to hear this happen to SSDs now as well as those carry so much higher of a cost.
 
Wow...now I'm paranoid. On my advice my father in law just bought a Vertex 4 SSD yesterday to replace his slow laptop drive. I loaded the OS last night but I guess I'm going to go test it this afternoon.
 
To me this is yet another reason to only buy SSDs from Intel, Crucial or Samsung.
 
Makes you wonder how those few made it through manufacturing since they're not counterfeits of the standard chips used in those drives, though KF's quick and thorough handling of the issue is commendable.
 
Yes crucial is a division of Micron. So all 3 manufacturers I mentioned I would expect have 0 chance of producing SSDs with counterfeit NAND chips since they would get the NAND from their own company.
 
drescherjm said:
Yes crucial is a division of Micron. So all 3 manufacturers I mentioned I would expect have 0 chance of producing SSDs with counterfeit NAND chips since they would get the NAND from their own company.
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Yeah, but micron is specifically mentioned in the article..

This report involves the SSD manufacturer KingFast, as well as Micron and OCZ with respect to NAND flash memory. It is our opinion that all three companies are victims of this occurrence and had no knowledge of, or intent to produce or distribute the counterfeit SSD received. All three companies have been contacted for background and assistance and have been very accommodating in assisting with this report.
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Edit: okay i just reread the article it was micron memory that failed QC and was sold and then someone bought it and put it off as one that was good, my apologies i was just lost for a minute
 
China where else. But I'd like to ask this; Whats counterfeit these days anyway? The chips are probably made on the same equipment and in the same factory as the "real stuff" just with a different brand. IMHO I bet the companies themselves flood the market with so called counterfeit chips to prevent anyone else from actually doing so.
 
The Lurker said:
China where else. But I'd like to ask this; Whats counterfeit these days anyway? The chips are probably made on the same equipment and in the same factory as the "real stuff" just with a different brand. IMHO I bet the companies themselves flood the market with so called counterfeit chips to prevent anyone else from actually doing so.
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:facedesk:
 
I believe I recall an incident where a reviewer opened up an OCZ ssd and remarked that the flash chips inside were marked as rejects. I wonder if the same thing happened there and people just assumed the company was doing it intentionally?
 
My wife bought me a Agility 3 480gig SSD for xmas..
After reading this I thought I would run the AS test and don't like my numbers :(

SEQ R:230.11 / W 131.13
4K R:19.76 / 13.39
4k-64 R:87.05 / 42.87
Acc R:0.107 / 0.270

Score 130 / 69
269


Am I looking at this wrong? or is this about right?

Axe
 
An interesting takeaway is that they tested the counterfeit drive with a bunch of different benchmark tests, and PCMark Vantage failed to show any problem with the counterfeit drive.
 
Axehandler said:
My wife bought me a Agility 3 480gig SSD for xmas..
After reading this I thought I would run the AS test and don't like my numbers :(

SEQ R:230.11 / W 131.13
4K R:19.76 / 13.39
4k-64 R:87.05 / 42.87
Acc R:0.107 / 0.270

Score 130 / 69
269


Am I looking at this wrong? or is this about right?

Axe
Click to expand...

being an agility 3, you have async nand, it does not perform well on AS. run CDM, with 0 fill and you will see your advertised numbers.

make sure you have ahci enabled as well. it should tell you what driver it is trying to use in the AS test. make sure you are aligned OK as well.
 
If only the manufacturers would publish some sort of exact performance metrics for their drives instead of " With random read performance up to 50,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS)1 and sequential read performance of up to 550 megabytes per second (MB/s),2 your PC will blaze through the most demanding applications and will handle intense multi-tasking needs. Couple that read performance with random writes up to 80,000 IOPS3 and sequential writes of 520 MB/s2 to unleash your applications."

Which (in this case, the 520 by intel) then benches at under 400 MB/s . Even the incompressible read test was under 500 MB/s. Or maybe we've all been getting counterfit drives.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/...cherryville-brings-reliability-to-sandforce/3
 
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