Fake or Real

[NugentS]

Following on from @jgreco 's thread on Fake Server Cards. https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/fake-server-cards.106077/

I thought I would post some photos from my drawer of doom server cards. Fake or Real?
Card #1

Card #2

Card #3

 

[artlessknave]

my insticts say the first 2 are suspicious, while the last looks more legit.
one reason is that 2 cards have plastic holding the heatsinks while the last one has brass. the last one also has a sticker with things like where it was made, the others do not. that sticker looks like stock LSI.

 

[jgreco]

That last one is an IBM ServeRAID M1015. The brass is a nice touch but I have some with plastic here. I'm pretty sure I've seen the brass in the distant past though.

I see two things that make me think #2 is fake but the others may not be.

A) Board #2 isn't as shiny

B) Lack of full fingers on the SFF-8087's



The connector on the right, where the fingers go all the way down underneath the metal clip, is a connector style I can observe on a bunch of legitimate baked-by-LSI (either LSI retail, or LSI-manufactured OEM, like ServeRAID) cards. The connector on the left is often found on PERC cards, which have, in my opinion, a lower quality build more reminiscent of knockoffs. I assume Dell is manufacturing these elsewhere. I have come to associate lack of full fingers with "lower quality". I do not have a HUGE sample set to compare though. If someone like Art of Server can tell me I'm wrong, I'll go with that.

 

[NugentS]

From memory (and this was more than 2 years ago) I bought 4 cards, in two pairs.
My spare server has one card in that works correctly with a SAS expander, the other cards whilst they sort of worked had issues with firmware and a SAS Expander. This would imply it is in fact 2 fake, 1 real. [Or I was being incompetant, not something I can rule out exactly]

Probably