Returning all zeros randomly is one of the failure modes of crappy consumer SSDs with buggy controllers. Especially those found in cheap laptops and on Amazon.

Returning all zeros randomly is one of the failure modes of crappy consumer SSDs with buggy controllers. Especially those found in cheap laptops and on Amazon. If it’s a fully counterfeit drive it might even be maliciously reporting a size larger than it has flash chips to support. It will accept writes without error but return zeros for sectors that are “fake”. This can appear random due to wear-leveling in the controller.