- More fake Samsung SSDs have been discovered and the drive maker has said it is “taking consistent action against such counterfeits.”
- At the same time, we’re told that CPU sales are apparently in a major decline, the worst seen in a decade.
- With the PC component crisis becoming more intense, there is hope for some relief later this year, but the way it will materialize is not very comforting.
As the PC components crisis intensifies, with CPU sales now apparently in serious decline, we’ve received another warning about fake Samsung SSDs as scammers try to cash in on the expensive high-end units.
Firstly, let’s look at the nastiness of SSDs, with German tech site ComputerBase reporting (via VideoCardz) that an Austrian buyer had the misfortune of receiving two Samsung 990 Pro SSDs from a retailer and both have been confirmed to be fake.
While the packaging of the 1TB drives looked authentic enough and didn’t raise any alarm bells, inspection of the SSDs did, as they had a blue circuit board (rather than the black color Samsung uses). They also used the wrong SSD controller (a Realtek model instead of a Pascal controller).
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However, the real sign that something was seriously wrong was the fact that these solid state drives didn’t work at all. (Unlike the best counterfeits, which work and may even look like the correct model when installed on a PC if you do nothing more than a cursory inspection.)
When ComputerBase informed Samsung about this incident, the company provided a statement saying: “Samsung takes these reports of counterfeit memory products very seriously. We are taking consistent action against the distribution of such counterfeits.
“We recommend purchasing Samsung storage media exclusively through the Samsung online store or authorized retailers. Consumers can also use the Samsung Magician software to verify that their product is genuine.”
With the price of CPUs rising, perhaps we should also be wary of an increase in counterfeit processors (like the counterfeit Ryzen 9800X3D chips we’ve seen handed out to unsuspecting consumers in the past).
More generally, is it true that more expensive processors and the memory crisis in general are killing desktop silicon sales? Apparently this is indeed happening, as mentioned at the beginning.
PC Gamer reports that TechEpiphany, which regularly publishes figures from major German retailer Mindfactory, shared some recent data on In reality, it’s mainly AMD Ryzen sales that have fallen, although that’s partly because Intel’s sales numbers were already much lower in early 2026, and it’s a telling drop.
Based on that data and other sales figures pulled from companies like Amazon, TechEpiphany posted on
Analysis: a crisis of 11.5 levels
To say this is the biggest drop TechEpiphany has seen in the last decade is quite a statement regarding CPU sales. When asked ‘on a scale of 1 to 10, where are we?’ In a follow-up post on X, TechEpiphany responded that we are currently at ‘11.5’.
Are processor prices really increasing that much? Well, following rumors of major price increases late last year, they are certainly going up as there is a CPU shortage that is becoming more serious.
However, it’s not just processors in a bubble, but the entire custom PC market. With rising prices for all components, and particularly RAM and storage, building a computer from scratch (or considering a substantial upgrade to a new motherboard platform for an existing system) has become a ridiculously expensive affair.
So people just aren’t doing that, and this is going to depress sales of CPUs and indeed all components, not just the memory side of the equation, where the price increases have been truly astronomical.
The increasing appearance of counterfeit products as fraudsters try to profit from these high prices will not help the situation either. It’s not great news that fake Samsung SSDs have arrived in Europe, after an increase was already seen in Japan, although at least this latest episode of counterfeiting was not as sophisticated as previously seen.
There is hope here, and that is that these stupidly high prices (and the PC market in general is getting out of hand) will actually result in a refusal to buy by consumers (as has apparently been seen with CPUs, but also RAM recently). That in itself could rebalance supply and demand to some extent and cause prices to fall. And as PC Gamer also discovered, MediaTek is tentatively predicting a more optimistic price trajectory for RAM in the second half of 2026 based on this type of theorizing.
MediaTek senior vice president and head of global sales Eric Fischer recently told analyst firm Counterpoint: “We are very cautious, perhaps cautiously optimistic about the second half.” [of 2026]about where it’s going because, at some point, prices will have an impact on consumer spending ability, whether it’s laptops or [other] consumer products.”
This is a sentiment we’ve heard elsewhere, but it’s actually not so comforting that the best hope for the RAM crisis to loosen its grip on our wallets is for prices to simply rise so high that people flat-out refuse to spend. But here we are, and apparently this is what we’ve come to…
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