I had a fake board at one point, I was lucky and was able to return it to the vendor on ebay. It looked like the real thing but it was so unstable the system couldn't even boot with it installed half the time. Much less actually accessing a drive attached to it. The give away that it was fake was that it came with a driver CD that wasn't even a good replica of the factory one and the traces on the board where not the same quality of a real board. Outside of that it looked like the real thing.