If you recall, about a month ago I managed to get an Apple iMac from 2006. that looked great. Unfortunately, after replacing the SSD and adding some stuff to it, the system crashed. Today, I wanted to play with the SSD a bit and discoverd super very low transfer speeds (less than 600KB/s). After opening Disk Utility and running the “Repair Disk” option, the speed seems to have picked up, going to 2.6MB/s, which was still WAAAAY slower than either SATA III, the supported protocol on the drive, or USB2.0 on the lower speed SATA-to-USB adapter I was using. I could have used my USB 3.0 adapter, but it kept making my computer not see the drive and thought the adapter was busted.

Looking at whatever was reported in the OS doesn’t show anything bad in particular, but failing three times to copy a file when I was trying to test the speed of the drive an idea took shape in my mind: “what if this drive is fake?”. It can’t be. I’ve seen it happen a ton of times on the internet, and I’ve bought this drive from a good store. So let’s see. Upon re-inserting the drive into my USB port, I can see that it has about 128 GB in use. Could it have only an 128GB NAND? The packaging was legit, I remember it took some effort to dig through the entire plastic box, the box looked like nothing in particular, the drive also got the embossed Kingston and a warranty seal over one of the screws.

So what can be wrong? Let’s put this theory to the test.

First of all, I installed F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) by running the command brew install f3 to be able to do some read/write tests.

However, and this is where the story abruptly ends, the SSD cannot be used anymore (probably wrote too much data on it), and it even throws an error when trying to format it.

I will get an answer from the shop where I bought it in a few days (I hope) and I’ll update the article with more info. While initially thought it’s an adapter with an SD card in it or something, I think it’s actually a failed or RMAd genuine 128GB Kingston SSD who got its firmware modified by a third party. If they won’t accept a return on this, I’ll open it up and see what’s inside it.

I’m surprised about the level of detail put into making this fake, and I low-key admire their ingenuity in using a genuine Kingston case, but as you can see in the photos below, the back sticker print is very low quality, and should have been a warning since day one.

So in the future make sure that when you purchase something you get it from a reputable source (I got mine from eMag, which is the biggest online retailer in Romania), but I didn’t actually check properly and the product I got was “sold by SomeFakeCompany, fulfilled by eMag”. Basically I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book, the “fulfilled by Amazon” scam.

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.

I did contact eMag to both warn them about the scam seller and also to get them to reimburse me, but I’ll see what they reply and update the article soon.

Meanwhile, the iMac will have to work with a 320GB spinning hard drive.

I was able to eventually format the drive as ExtFAT and the writing speeds were awful while running f3write which writes files of 1.0GB in size.

Creating file 1.h2w ... 0.01% -- 2.80 MB/s -- 100:04:44^C

So I reformatted it as MacOS Journaled, and while at start it was promising, writing files at about 250MB/s, it quickly started to slow down. You can see how the estimated time for the entire task is increasing very fast, but I don’t think that it’ll complete, as it started to go awfully wrong at the 128gb mark (which is consistent with my previous assumption that it’s a genuine 128GB SSD that had its firmware rewritten and a 960 label slapped on it).

Also the customer support from eMag contacted me and said they’ll start the return process from their side, so the good news is that I’ll get my money back.

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Creating file 3.h2w ... 0.24% -- 387.70 MB/s -- 57:54  
Creating file 12.h2w ... 1.23% -- 86.54 MB/s -- 1:05:24
Creating file 13.h2w ... 1.35% -- 37.16 MB/s -- 1:33:17 
...
Creating file 16.h2w ... 1.67% -- 26.27 MB/s -- 2:45:17 
...
Creating file 19.h2w ... 1.97% -- 25.93 MB/s -- 4:15:42
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Creating file 31.h2w ... 3.25% -- 37.24 MB/s -- 5:32:10
...
Creating file 53.h2w ... 5.62% -- 34.24 MB/s -- 6:29:40
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Creating file 64.h2w ... 6.83% -- 35.13 MB/s -- 6:41:47
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Creating file 73.h2w ... 7.74% -- 28.15 MB/s -- 6:59:34
...
Creating file 88.h2w ... 9.39% -- 35.98 MB/s -- 7:03:19
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Creating file 111.h2w ... 11.86% -- 19.42 MB/s -- 7:03:08
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Creating file 114.h2w ... 12.24% -- 9.39 MB/s -- 7:25:36 
Creating file 115.h2w ... 12.35% -- 4.82 MB/s -- 7:37:48  
Creating file 116.h2w ... 12.38% -- 2.68 MB/s -- 7:50:07

Eventually I put a stop to this, as it needed about 6 minutes to write 1GB, so this means it’s very close to filling the disk drive.

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Creating file 117.h2w ... 12.47% -- 2.51 MB/s -- 8:22:45
30 July Update: Got refunded for the entire amount.