That's one way to deal with the counterfeiting problem -- just counterfeit your own devices! It's what the "sort by lowest price first" market demands, I guess.
Yeah, I think Samsung's consumer SSDs are up there. I have two and they're great. But, there is no "sort by highest quality first" option on Newegg or Amazon, and their happy customers are already happy with their SSDs.
(This is going to digress into reviews being the "sort by quality", but I think we know that reviews aren't very good. The fundamental problem is that most throwaway reviewers don't know how to review something as complex as an SSD. So unless the option on the ecommerce site is "sort by what Anandtech thinks about this", you are probably just sorting by a random and easily-manipulated number.)
Even if they did review them well, most reviews are samples provided by manufacturer, and are performed on a single unit typically. If a manufacturer is willing to swap components in batches of products, they're willing to try to cheat reviewers too.
It's important for reviewers to keep their eye on what people are saying about a product. I after they review something, user reviews don't line up, they should purchase a unit themselves and redo their testing. If the testing shows a change, then they should both shame the company and stop accepting review units from that division of the company so they can be sure they're not getting hand-picked samples.
In an ideal world yes but I don't think I've ever experienced reviews being done like this. Rtings purchase their own units but still would run afoul of swapping xomponents in lines. Reviews of live service video games are rarely updated unless something drastic changes (see the Destiny 2 issues where they pulled old content from the game...)
They do have good R&D and some pretty nice technology, that side of the business is solid, but their product divisions will frequently cut some pretty severe corners to get stuff out on time regardless of whether it's ready or not.
It the last years Samsung where the ones to beat in the SSD space. Higher price and higher perfomance, which can be measured but seldom felt in day to day operations, so i opted to save some bucks and bought Crucial SSDs.
