The big advantage of ordering from China is that you can get your equipment at very low prices. A quick visit to Aliexpress will give you an idea of the prices on offer. However, while you may be tempted by a good deal, you mustn’t forget that China is still China, and there are plenty of crooks out there. A case in point is that of a buyer of an external M.2 SSD who ended up with two micro-SD cards instead of an SSD.
External SSD M.2: be careful when buying in China!
It’s quite simple: you’ve got a little something to buy, you want to get the best deal possible, so you check out Chinese stores. Advantage: the low price, you look at the reviews, which are often unanimous (and potentially wrong?), and you buy. The only problem is that the external storage you’ve just bought is actually a big scam, as it simply doesn’t contain any SSD !
This is what happened recently to a user who tried it. Unfortunately, where an external M.2 SSD is usually around 1 GB/s, this device was particularly slow. Speeds struggled to exceed 100 MB/s. To make sure there wasn’t “a ball in the pie”, the user disassembled his SSD. The problem was quickly identified: it wasn’t an SSD, but two micro-SD cards mounted on a piece of PCB. To ensure connection with the PC, we found a micro-USB socket with two 256 GB cards, in line with the 512 GB ordered.
Of course, when you see the archaic DIY on offer, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s probably not worth the money. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of the external hard drive scam from China. Instead of a hard disk, users were usually left with a USB stick plugged into the case, with two bolts glued in place with a glue gun to pretend it was a real hard disk.
No doubt about it, they’re good!