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I was wanting to ask the forum about purchasing a Pioneer internal drive off of Ebay that can read 4K UHD. I know it is risky, but is there a way to tell or spot a fake. I am only looking at buying from a US seller and not a Chinese one, but I know you can still get a fake. Any help will be appreciated.

sbguy13 wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 14, 2026 3:27 am

I was wanting to ask the forum about purchasing a Pioneer internal drive off of Ebay that can read 4K UHD. I know it is risky, but is there a way to tell or spot a fake. I am only looking at buying from a US seller and not a Chinese one, but I know you can still get a fake. Any help will be appreciated.

You can't but chances to return the drive are much better if you buy from an US seller.

Thanks I appreciate it. I will hope for the best!

The issue is that even though it could look like they are selling a genuine drive you don't know if they post real pictures. I have done some research into this and it seems that multiple users have drives for sale but they use the same pictures etc. Almost all sellers are from China and if you look at the reviews almost nobody posts a review after they buy a drive.

I have done some checking against reviews, videos etc so I know what to look for but the pictures they use could be fake, it is impossible to know if you are buying a genuine one or not. Also if you buy a unit, I guess you have to open it to check if it is genuine but how do you know what to look for ?

If you buy one direct in hand from a shop it would be harder for them to scam you but as this is online there is not much you can do. It seems there are more pioneer slim drives, left over stock when they shut down production compared to the 5.25 drivers. Not surprising as most users today with a desktop case do not have any 5.25 slots and laptops are much more popular. I am sure Pioneer had a much larger production of slim drives going back a decade.

From what I can understand on this forum and online is that 5.25 drivers are better than slim versions. Pioneer was over all better than the other brands. LG was in second place but the over all quality was all over the place depending on what model you buy etc. And the last one on the list is Asus, Verbatim etc but they used different Pioneer and LG drives as hardware. They sold it as their own brand and perhaps they had some custom branded firmware with the name, logo and small things like that.

Sadly there are few sellers of Pioneer driver unless you cant to pay a lot of money. It is not hard finding the LG drivers but there are not many sellers in the USA or else where. Almost everyone seems to be located in China.