German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours

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German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours (www.tomshardware.com)

Archive: https://archive.today/wip/zjH3g

From the post:

>German outlet Heise.de says it may have uncovered fraud after hearing from many of its readers who bought supposedly new Seagate hard drives, which turned out to be very much used. Last week, the publication relayed the experience of one of Heise.de’s readers, who said he had bought a couple of 14TB Seagate Exos HDDs that seemed a little strange. The drives had some minor signs of wear on the outside, but after a quick look at the SMART stats, everything appeared normal. Later, though, the reader did a more thorough Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) test and discovered that one drive had already been used for 10,000 hours, and the other 15,000 hours.

Archive: https://archive.today/wip/zjH3g From the post: >>German outlet Heise.de says it may have uncovered fraud after hearing from many of its readers who bought supposedly new Seagate hard drives, which turned out to be very much used. Last week, the publication relayed the experience of one of Heise.de’s readers, who said he had bought a couple of 14TB Seagate Exos HDDs that seemed a little strange. The drives had some minor signs of wear on the outside, but after a quick look at the SMART stats, everything appeared normal. Later, though, the reader did a more thorough Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) test and discovered that one drive had already been used for 10,000 hours, and the other 15,000 hours.

(post is archived)

[–] • 1 pt

Lots of HDDs (over 3TB) sold as new are in fact refurbished by Chinese companies from data centers.

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[–] • 1 pt

No doubt sold by amazon.

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[–] • 1 pt

Exos drives are server farm drives. It’s easy enough to get them with 2.5-3 years on them used, and they’re dirt cheap - sometimes with a good warranty.

I know plenty of people that buy them for data farms, use them for 2 more years, and cycle out. Sounds like a bunch of these got released into retail channels, and resellers being the shysters they are, bought them on the cheap and didn’t ask questions.

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