The speed is kind of a red herring. The defining characteristic of fake drives is that they have less than the advertised capacity, but have a hacked firmware that misreports their capacity to the system, and fails when more than the actual capacity is written. So to find out whether a drive is fake, you have to fill it all the way and read the data back.
Counterfeit mainly just means it's pretending to be something that it isn't. It's entirely possible this drive has the advertised capacity (though I wouldn't count on it), but it would still be a fake.
No, it isn't the advertised capacity, because counterfeiting scams require a large ratio between the value of the part claimed and the part provided, and you can't get 2TB of flash memory chips cheaply no matter how slow you're willing to accept. When counterfeit storage devices like this are disassembled, usually they're found to have a small microSD card in them.
Is that actually true for SSDs? I was under the impression that manufacturers have a speed-capacity tradeoff "knob" they can adjust.
Specifically, that each buried gate can store one bit (SLC), two bits (MLC), three bits (TLC) or even more.
Obviously more bits means closer thresholds, making the gate more susceptible to electrical noise when reading and writing (and process variation in the dopant loading).
It's pretty easy to think up ways to pack in more bits that would slow down the read rate... such as applying multi-level ECC or just waiting longer for the read ADCs to settle.
There's a big difference between Samsung's 990 Pro NAND and controller chips (TLC NAND, DRAM acceleration, and a good controller), vs. bottom bin flash storage. It could be used QLC (4-bit per cell) NAND with no DRAM and a much, much worse controller and still have 2TB of space.
For context, actual "real" low-end NVMe drives are 2TB for ~$180. The Samsung is $300 for 2TB right now. I could easily see you cutting cost by using used NAND and horrible controllers and get a cost much lower.
Maybe the slow transfer speeds are part of the cover up. If it takes 6 weeks of constant writing to reach the 64gb of storage limit of the actual chips then no one will ever find out that it's actually a 64gb ssd.
I thought this was only common on fake flash drives and external SSDs? Has this been happening to NVMe SSDs as well? It's definitely possible, but scammers tend to be lazy to branch out beyond what already works, and SSDs are a bit more complex.
