- Several fake Samsung SSDs have been uncovered, with the drive maker saying it ‘takes consistent action against such fakes’
- At the same time, CPU sales are apparently in a major slump, the worst seen in a decade, we are told
- Now that the PC component crisis is only getting more intense, there’s hope for some relief later this year – but the way it’s being realized isn’t very comforting
As the PC component crisis intensifies, with CPU sales now apparently in serious decline, we’ve got another warning about fake Samsung SSDs as fraudsters try to take advantage of expensive high-end drives.
First up, let’s look at the SSD ugliness, with German tech site ComputerBase reporting (via VideoCardz) that an Austrian buyer had the misfortune of receiving two Samsung 990 Pro SSDs from a dealer, both of which have been confirmed as fake.
While the packaging of the 1TB drives looked authentic enough and didn’t ring any alarm bells, inspection of the SSDs did as they had a blue printed circuit board (instead of the black color Samsung uses). They also used the wrong SSD controller (a Realtek model instead of a Pascal controller).
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The real sign that something was very wrong, however, was that these solid-state drives weren’t working at all. (Unlike better fakes, which work and may even appear to be the real model when installed in a PC if you don’t engage in more than a cursory inspection).
When Samsung was told about this incident by ComputerBase, the company provided a statement that read: “Samsung takes such reports of counterfeit memory products very seriously. We take consistent measures against the distribution of such counterfeits.
“We recommend purchasing Samsung storage media exclusively through the Samsung Online Shop or authorized resellers. Consumers can also use the Samsung Magician software to verify that their product is genuine.”
With the price of CPUs creeping up, we may also have to be wary of an increase in processor fakes (such as the fake Ryzen 9800X3D chips we’ve previously seen foisted on unsuspecting consumers).
More broadly, is it the case that more expensive processors, and the pressures of the memory crisis in general, are killing desktop silicon sales? Apparently, this is actually happening, as mentioned at the beginning.
PC Gamer reports that TechEpiphany, which regularly posts figures from major German retailer Mindfactory, shared some recent data on the X showing that processor sales have fallen sharply in the past three weeks (after being in somewhat of a slump throughout March). It’s mainly AMD Ryzen sales that have actually fallen – although that’s partly a function of Intel’s sales numbers already being quite a bit smaller at the start of 2026 – and it’s an eye-opening slump.
Based on this data and other sales figures obtained from Amazon, TechEpiphany wrote on X that: “In 10 years of tracking retail CPU (and related) sales, I have never seen such a steep decline.”
Analysis: an 11.5 level crisis
To say that this is the biggest single decline that TechEpiphany has witnessed in the last decade is quite an understatement for CPU sales. When asked ‘on a scale of 1-10, how are we done?’ in a follow-up post on X, TechEpiphany responded that we are currently on ‘11.5’.
Are processor prices really rising that much? Well, after rumors of big price hikes at the end of last year, they’re definitely going up as there’s a CPU shortage that’s getting more severe.
However, this is not just about processors in a bubble, but the entire custom PC market. With the prices of all components rising, and especially RAM along with storage, building a computer from scratch – or looking at a major upgrade to a new motherboard platform for an existing system – has become a ridiculously expensive affair.
So people just don’t, and that will slow down CPU sales, and indeed all components – not just the memory side of the equation, where the price increases have been truly astronomical.
Counterfeit products that are increasingly being rolled out as fraudsters try to take advantage of these high prices won’t help the situation either. It’s not good news that fake Samsung SSDs have now reached Europe after an increase was already observed in Japan – although at least this latest round of counterfeiting was not as sophisticated as previously seen.
There is one hope here, namely that these stupidly high prices – and the PC market in general getting out of hand – actually results in a reluctance to buy from consumers (as apparently seen with CPUs, but also recently RAM). That in itself can rebalance the supply and demand seesaw to some extent and lead to prices falling. And as PC Gamer also discovered, MediaTek is tentatively predicting a more optimistic pricing plan for RAM in the second half of 2026 based on this kind of theorizing.
MediaTek’s SVP and head of global sales, Eric Fischer, recently told analyst firm Counterpoint: “We’re super cautious, maybe cautiously optimistic about the second half [of 2026]about where it’s going, because prices will at some point have an impact on the consumer’s ability to use – whether it’s notebooks or [other] consumer products.”
This is a sentiment we’ve heard elsewhere, but it’s not really that comforting that the best hope for the RAM crisis to loosen its grip on our wallets is for prices to simply go so high that people outright refuse to spend. But here we are and apparently this is what it has come to…
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