Used Seagate HDDs scandal?

[Bwaze]

Fraudulent hard drive scandal deepens at Seagate: Clues point at Chinese Chia mining farms

Curious I haven't seen anything reported here. It's more of a European stores scandal, although there have been reports from other regions.

There are a lot of Seagate HDDs now labeled "Refurbished" with shorter, shop only warranty - but they still come with erased SMART stats, and deeper examination shows in some of them they have been in use for years, being virtually useless. But they still come at a relatively high price - the same price these drives were priced at two years ago, meanwhile other shops are pricing "brand new" disks at extremely high premium.

Are HDDs really becoming extremely expensive, but we're missing this because shops are masking it with refurbished drives - some labeled as such, but often not?

Some are saying this isn't a Seagate scandal at all - that Seagate is one of the only companies we have tools to read any other daya than SMART stats and determine if the drives were used or not, and if the data was tampered with.

 

[_roman_]

This was an old topic.

Summary:

Buy a drive. Check their homepage if it is a consumer drive and the warranty. I'm not sure if that is common knowledge to do with new harddrives.

I think i saw it several months ago

 

[R-T-B]

Any manufacturer can reset the SMART data of their own drives as they make the firmware. The question is whether they are doing it without refurbing the drive and just passing off used garbage. I can't comment either way there.

 

[Bwaze]

Doesn't this only differentiate if the drive was intended for consumer sale, or system integration / OEM? I know some stores were selling new drives (years ago) that had only store warranty, because they weren't intended to be sold individually to customers?

I think this is slowly becoming a minefield. Seagate says to only buy from certified vendors, but then it lists all the shops people have gotten their used drives from.

 

[_roman_]

I'm not sure. Maybe there was a seagate tool and some smartctl add on to read out the real hours

I'm not a seagate customer anymore - maybe someone can dig up some valueable information there.

News - Betrug mit Seagate-Festplatten: Händler verkaufen gebrauchte HDDs als Neuware

In der News fehlt eine ganz entscheidende Information: Hat irgendjemand zumindest mal eine Hand voll Platten gescannt auf Fehler (Ja, das dauert whs nen guten Tag)? Es wäre interessant ob diese denn technisch einwandfrei sind oder fehlerhaft. Letzeres wäre im Falle von Betrug wesentlich...

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