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

[Admin]

German publication Heise.de reports that over fifty of its readers received used hard drives when they were supposed to receive brand-new models.

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

 

[popatim]

 

[Dr3ams]

Seagate has been selling refurbished HDDs here in Germany for years. The two Seagate 1 TB drives I'm currently using are refurbished and I bought them around 8 years ago.

From my expereince Seagate has always put a refurbished sticker on drives that were used. This has me thinking that Seagate released those drives to vendors (without the stickers) hoping no one would notice that the HDDs are used.

 

[zcomputerwiz]

Seagate has been selling refurbished HDDs here in Germany for years. The two Seagate 1 TB drives I'm currently using are refurbished and I bought them around 8 years ago.

From my expereince Seagate has always put a refurbished sticker on drives that were used. This has me thinking that Seagate released those drives to vendors (without the stickers) hoping no one would notice that the HDDs are used.

They do more than the green label stickers in the US - they also laser etch REFURBISHED into the disk case. Not sure if it is the same worldwide, but I would expect it is.

Generally with these disks there are no signs of use.

 

[pigeonskiller]

A few years ago I bought 2 1.5TB HDs. A few months later, despite little use, one broke, and was replaced under warranty with a refurbished one (!). Shortly after that the refurbished one also broke. Even the last disk eventually broke and I decided not to change it under warranty given the unreliability of that company's hardware. Since then I have decided to never give my money to Seagate again...

 

[pigeonskiller]

A few years ago I bought 2 1.5TB HDs. A few months later, despite little use, one broke, and was replaced under warranty with a refurbished one (!). Shortly after that the refurbished one also broke. Even the last disk eventually broke and I decided not to change it under warranty given the unreliability of that company's hardware. Since then I have decided to never give my money to Seagate again...

 

[zcomputerwiz]

A few years ago I bought 2 1.5TB HDs. A few months later, despite little use, one broke, and was replaced under warranty with a refurbished one (!). Shortly after that the refurbished one also broke and since then I have decided to never give my money to Seagate again...

How long ago was that? I know there was a point in time when it was difficult to get disks due to flooding at their primary manufacturing plant, and some models were absolutely terrible. I remember the 1tb were quite bad, and heard the 750gb and 1.5tb of the series were bad as well.

 

[pigeonskiller]

How long ago was that? I know there was a point in time when it was difficult to get disks due to flooding at their primary manufacturing plant, and some models were absolutely terrible. I remember the 1tb were quite bad, and heard the 750gb and 1.5tb of the series were bad as well.

If I remember correctly, some time after that event. However, this does not justify the company's attitude in marketing defective products and recovering financial losses with the money of good-faith customers...

 

[vanadiel007]

Something about this story does not make sense. Like where would the hard drives come from?

 

[DS426]

Something about this story does not make sense. Like where would the hard drives come from?

It's definitely going to take more diligence from tech news outlets to uproot who the big distributors are. Saying these drives were "bought from Seagate" is quite disingenuous as it leaves out a few steps of the supply chain and suggests that they were bought from Seagate's own store. No, rather, they are manufactured by Seagate. After that, some entity is pulling this scam where recycled drives are having SMART cleared and going back into the distribution stream or directly to retailers.

Amazon has all sorts of scams and counterfeit products, so that doesn't say anything. As for Mindfactory, surprising to me but if they source those models from a distributor and not directly from Seagate's factories, that allows that middleman tampering problem.

That said, it's still feasible that there's a small splinter cell at one of the Seagate factories that has been pulling this off under the radar. Either way, I'm extremely curious to see how this all unfolds!

 

[OldAnalogWorld]

I have never bought Seagate, only WD/Toshiba/Fujitsu/IBM (and earlier server versions of Samsung). Once I got one (SMR) as part of a laptop with NAND cache, it has been working for 7 years, although its performance during large copy operations is terrible, despite the 8GB NAND buffer.

Most of my drives are from WD. The only problem was with 1.5TB drives. They crumbled even in the complete absence of any vibration and even with an ideal (after a full scan) surface immediately after purchase - about 1.5-2 years. And they were in 2 different heavy cases with good cooling with good power supplies.

But the latest WD purchases have shown that their reliability has seriously dropped even with the same capacity as very old ones - 2TB. With a much weaker load than before, because now the system drives are only SSDs. And the prices in $ have not fallen at all in 15 years. At the same time, back in 2010, WD Green came with a 5-year warranty. I have such disks for 2 TB. I switched to Toshiba server disks without helium for 8 TB with a 5-year warranty and a read/write resource of 550 TB per year. Although they are quite noisy. But for backup, this is not important. Most of the time, all my HDDs are turned off to avoid the risk of random vibrations near the cases and impacts (especially dangerous with modern high platter density and low head suspension, if there are children or large animals in the house), including those that are in system units thanks to 5.25" drive power selectors. When needed, I turn them on and then immediately turn them off.

I also began to suspect, judging by the mass failures in some series according to reviews in a number of large retail chains, that some SSD batches of disks are clearly either repackaged like new (already used and worn out with reset SMART parameters) or for different countries there are batches with different grades of NAND chips. For third world countries, either repackaged restored / worn out or lower grade. For the USA and Western Europe - the highest grade, only new chips.

------
Unlike SSD, where real wear is extremely difficult to check (long time frames of the test for the rate of charge loss in cells), in HDD wear is most often easily checked by a full surface scan - if there were already head hits on the protective layer and there were chips, all this will quickly be visible in slow sectors, whole blocks. A disk that has worked for tens of thousands of hours cannot look new a priori, unless this is a factory repackaging of the can - there will be noticeable traces and irreparable dust almost everywhere and it will be visible by the quality of the plate surface after the scan. And "restoration" at the Seagate plant without replacing the plates and possibly heads - does not cancel the fact of wear of the servo drive / heads and plates, which have a finite resource, including the protective layer. So such a disk is quite easy to distinguish in an individual case, but not when you buy a large batch - but these are the problems of the company's purchasers and their risks.

 

[spinningrust]

My money would say that these are qual drives that were built solely to prove MTBF on the label. Drive manufacturers build thousands to test MTBF in parallel, then they have these used drives that are still good but not 'new' Seagate is probably trying to recoup some cost letting these out, got caught.

 

[Nightshadepony]

I have an educated guess that if the drives were made in 2021 that would be around the timeframe of the launch of Chia a new digital asset that you mined with hard drives so maybe somehow those drives were returned or something then sold to the customers in this article I don't know just a theory

 

[Syriker]

A few months ago I bought a 10TB HDD from a German Amazon seller for a pretty good price (too good to be true, like everything, I guess). I didn't test it too much, but it showed physical wear and tear like the article said, so I guess I'm one of the "scammed" people here. Is there a way I can also test how many hours my drive has? All smart reads were erased, but it showed risks as well.

edit: orthography

 

[wes45]

German publication Heise.de reports that over fifty of its readers received used hard drives when they were supposed to receive brand-new models.

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

Hi. Im from Philippines. I have also encounter this situation. That I have brought new Seagate HDD 5tb. When I got home and testing the HDD 5tb, there is a sound of tick...tick....tick..., I search at internet about having a sound at HDD, and learned that if there is a sound at HDD there is a bad sector. I went to Seagate Service Center and they gave me new HDD. When I testing the new HDD there is also ticking sound. And again went to Seagate Service Center to replace on the 2nd time. Again there is a ticking sound. What happen to the Seagate products that many customers knows that there products is a good quality. Unfortunately becomes unreliable quality. It is so disappointed

 

[mattnicholas.art]

Seagate's EXOS logo totally looks like a polar bear impaled by a picnic umbrella.

 

[HankJones]

[German publication Heise.de reports that over fifty of its readers received used hard drives when they were supposed to receive brand-new models.]
Had similar experience in US 07/2021, Seagate drive failed under warranty. Unit was replaced twice maybe three times with faulty (failed S.M.A.R.T) drives.
I gave up on Seagate and bought Toshiba drives.

Please note quote below as response from from Edgar at Seagate.

"It's hard to believe that we already have two devices that are beginning to fail once you receive them, in this situation I want to apologize for this one in a million scenario, and please let me act accordingly to the situation." Edgar

 

[beyondlogic]

German publication Heise.de reports that over fifty of its readers received used hard drives when they were supposed to receive brand-new models.

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

i stopped using seagate as a system builder because of nonsense like this lol.

 

[Swedish photographer]

I bought 6 pieces of Seagate Exos 16 TB a week ago from a "trusted partner" to Seagate, (not Amazon). When they arrived, well packed but without Seagate packaging and without any information, just the disks in anti-static bags, I noticed that the DOM was in different months back in 2021. On Seagates site I tried to verify the warranty but for each disk I got the message "Please contact the place of purchase. This product was originally sold as a part of a larger system. Please contact the system manufacturer or your place of purchase for warranty support."

I then chatted with the Seagate customer suport that insured that all warranties were valid. This turned out to be false.

Now I get a message from the the selling website (Seagates "trusted partner") informing me that there is no Seagate warranty but that their retailer leaves a warranty. When I ask for the name of the retailer and a copy of their warranty I get no such information.

So I turn back to the Seagate chatt support who now informs me that these are OEM-disks and that Seagate does not consider them as Seagate-disks any longer. Rather they consider them IBM-, Dell- or Compaq-disks depending on who bought them in the first place.

I still have not installed any of the disks, not even opened the anti-static bags, so I do not know if they have been used. Not sure how to check it in a RAID configuration on a Mac OS and are welcoming suggestions.

I have now demanded that Seagates "trusted partner", send me what I bought. New Seagate disks with Seagate warranty. They have told me that they will investigate how to handle this... While I am waiting, and waiting to get my RAID back on track and actually back to work.

Last time I bought hard drives was perhaps ten years ago. I recently had a RAID-crash (which was recovered, costing me a lot of money) so I wanted to be sure to get the best disks I could find. The warranty-issue was a key factor when deciding on what disks to buy. For a normal consumer as myself it is quite difficult to find valid information to make a well informed purchase. When I check the different stores that sells exactly the same product for almost the same price with the same (lack of) information, none of them in any way hints that these are OEM-disks and what that could imply. I don't know if I am to spoiled by Swedish consumer-rights but I know that the whole chain of companies supplying HDDs to consumers could be much more transparent. And I definitely think it should be in Seagates (and other manufacturers) interest to hold their "trusted partners" accountable for what information they provide when selling their products.

 

[KyaraM]

A few years ago I bought 2 1.5TB HDs. A few months later, despite little use, one broke, and was replaced under warranty with a refurbished one (!). Shortly after that the refurbished one also broke. Even the last disk eventually broke and I decided not to change it under warranty given the unreliability of that company's hardware. Since then I have decided to never give my money to Seagate again...

Interesting. I have used Seagate HDDs (from the Barracuda line, one Ironwolf in my NAS) for around 15 years now. They all work like on the first day. Not trying to contradict you, I will tell you the same thing about my experience with AMD GPUs so I really get it, I just it fascinating how different customer experiences can be!

It's definitely going to take more diligence from tech news outlets to uproot who the big distributors are. Saying these drives were "bought from Seagate" is quite disingenuous as it leaves out a few steps of the supply chain and suggests that they were bought from Seagate's own store. No, rather, they are manufactured by Seagate. After that, some entity is pulling this scam where recycled drives are having SMART cleared and going back into the distribution stream or directly to retailers.

Amazon has all sorts of scams and counterfeit products, so that doesn't say anything. As for Mindfactory, surprising to me but if they source those models from a distributor and not directly from Seagate's factories, that allows that middleman tampering problem.

That said, it's still feasible that there's a small splinter cell at one of the Seagate factories that has been pulling this off under the radar. Either way, I'm extremely curious to see how this all unfolds!

Yeah, I also don't necessarily think it's Seagate at fault, though it's currently quite hard to tell. The range of affected stores does suggest it's Seagate or one of the middlemen at fault, though, and as you said, Mindfactory is really surprising since they are pretty reliable. Never had any issues with them. It would be far more localized an issue if it was just one or two shops scamming people. Really interested in what's going on, hope there will be more info going forward.

 

[hwertz]

I got a used 16TB Seagate years back. Well I suppose 4 years back... it was properly sold as used, and the model had just come out a month or two earlier so I figured 'how used can it be?'. So I got a drive with like 20 hours on it for $50 less than new (roughly a 20% discount.). I suspect someone bought it, they had out of date windows that couldn't go past 2TB, or used Linux but put MBR partitioning on it (again 2TB limit), or whatever, therefore they returned it.