13 ms·

Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

383 points by 6581 2y ago

felindev 2y ago
> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?
- baobun 2y ago
  > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? WDs image was IIRC already not the best when the WD Red SMR thing blew up. I recall feeling smug but forget the background. I think they have a strong claim on title of most scandalous HDD maker.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    Does any WD model have its own Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 (I had one, it died just after its warranty ended but Seagate did send me a replacement after bitching about it for long enough.)
    - knute 2y ago
      There's an IBM Deathstar (sold to Hitachi, sold to WD) model that has its own section, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
      - magicalhippo 2y ago
        Lost my first 3 years of programming thanks to a Deathstar... Still miffed about it, as I enjoy going back looking at my earlier code. At least I learned to take backups, which has saved my butt several times since.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - baobun 2y ago
      I agree it's not an easy call between the two! I guess the conclusion of this episode could tip the scales, if we ever get an explanation. My best guesses right now are some mix of organized crime disrupting their German distribution and/or less publically acknowledged graymarket/OEM channels gone wrong. If it really comes from inside Seagate I don't think a sane person would buy from them again. It gets more nuanced when talking about their responsibility to keep oversight over their supply chains and distribution.
    - rasz 2y ago
      They both competed for worst drive :) https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-archived/amstrad-loses-us-hard-disk-lawsuit-1999-06/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar... " Western Digital supplied it with faulty disk drives during 1988 and 1989"
  - account42 2y ago
    It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.
- diggan 2y ago
  > One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising? Feels like a rite of passage for HDD sellers to somehow defraud consumers sooner or later.
  - jerf 2y ago
    "AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite." Claiming you're selling a new product and then selling a used product is straight-up fraud. This isn't even a warrantee issue, and no, the US legal system wouldn't just shrug and go "Oh well". This is the sort of thing that penetrates any amount of verbiage in a EULA the company may throw at you, including any sort of demand to go through arbitration, and depending on how widespread this is could easily become class-action, which is the corporate nightmare the forced-arbitration clauses are trying to avoid. You can't write yourself an open-ended right to commit basic fraud into any contract, no, not even in the US.
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      Class actions are for lawyers. They will lowball how much damage was done and consumers will see $6 once all is said and done. I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.
      - jerf 2y ago
        You'll note I called it a "corporate nightmare" and didn't describe as anything like the white horse coming to the rescue of the consumer.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  It's not clear to me that this is Seagate's fault. Sounds like retailers are selling used drives as new. Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do?
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do? I buy used enterprise drives for large home NAS and some Amazon "refurb" sellers will wipe SMART data, inc drive hours. I avoid them. It's a dumb thing to do for a known, used drive.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? Since you can't make an "X-gate" name for a scandal out of the Seagate's name, they can afford more bad publicity than other hard drive manufacturers. Truly an ingenious branding strategy.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Circa 2001 or so I bought about 5 Maxtor drives that all went bad in a year and I wasn't the only one. I never bought another Maxtor drive again. On the other hand, I've owned probably 20 Seagate drives and had maybe 1 fail, so I see them as a partner as much as a aprt.
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      Seagate acquired Maxtor and that's when people started complaining about Seagate reliability
- bluGill 2y ago
  there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      >My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble. This is, emphatically, not a good data point. You need thousands of drives running for years under normal loads to actually tease out outlier failure rates in a drive SKU. You need to literally do what Backblaze does.
      - danparsonson 2y ago
        I know, that's why I didn't say "you should buy these drives because I've never had any failures". I was just adding some context.
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    I'm a die-hard Ultrastar fan who was disappointed by their eventual sale to WD. But, for a sample size of 8 over a decade, I've been happy with my Toshiba laptop 2TB drives I have running in a small storage server.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - busterarm 2y ago
- toast0 2y ago
  > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? It's either Seagate, Western Digital, or the rotating third player in the market, but there haven't really been any other options for scanadals. I can't remember the last time the third player had a big scandal, but WD certainly goes through them from time to time. IBM DeskStar is a name that will live in infamy, but that was from before rotational drives really consolidated.
- teekert 2y ago
  I avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.
quesera 2y ago
Article is about reports from German customers (this is clear in the orignal title, but not the current HN title), and mostly with 16TB Exos HDDs. FWIW, I just bought a bunch of Seagate HDDs (US vendor) and my warranty periods line up with the DOMs on the packaging. You can check your warranty period/status at: https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements
- nbernard 2y ago
  Thanks! I just checked an 10TB Ironwolf bought to a German seller through Amazon.fr less than two months ago: Its warranty expires in a few days... :(
  - JAlexoid 2y ago
    From what I see, the majority of HDDs on Amazon are now used devices. Which isn't necessarily bad... HDDs have a much longer lifespan than SSDs. I expect my used HDDs to last at least 5years in my RAID5 setup.
    - xnorswap 2y ago
      How is listing used devices as new "not necessarily bad"? It's fraud.
      - quesera 2y ago
        Amazon sells both "new" and "refurbished" HDDs. They are clearly marked in the description, but this is often awkwardly-conveniently after the truncation point for search results listings, so you need to be vigilant. In contrast, the article is about used devices sold as new, and with SMART counters reset. That absolutely smells like fraud -- though to be fair, I can concoct at plausible sequence of errors and omissions that arrives at the same result. I expect that someone with subpoena power will need to take it from here.
        deleted 2y ago
Hamuko 2y ago
I've recently been browsing Amazon.de listings for a new HDD and I'm pretty sure I saw someone complain about their supposedly new Seagate EXOS already having hours on it. I also saw listings for SATA drives where the reviews were complaining about receiving SAS drives and complaints about bare HDDs being shipped rattling around in large cardboard boxes. I think the only conclusion I reached was that I should buy my HDD from somewhere that is not Amazon. Impossible to tell if they're selling a new or refurbished drive, a SATA or SAS drive or if it'll make it here safely.
- Cerium 2y ago
  Why buy any drives from Amazon? I always buy from a specialty dealer. Where I am that's usually B&H.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Well you see, the website that lets third parties sell used drives as new always offers the best prices on "new" drives :)
  - toast0 2y ago
    It's always more exciting to put your important data on a drive that's been shipped in a box that's much too big for it, with much too little packing material.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    Amazon has usually always been the cheapest option, especially compared to a specialty dealer. Costs add up when you're buying many drives.
    - Hizonner 2y ago
      Whenever I've looked, prices at B&H, or Newegg sold by Newegg, are usually within a few dollars of prices from any Amazon sellers that don't look obviously skeezy. It's a few dollars lower as often as it's a few dollars higher. Except, of course, for the dramatically cheaper drives you find from Amazon... which are definitely going to be used, defective, dropped, or fake. If you get them at all. They all seem to be selling them for very close to what they pay Seagate (or WD or whoever) for them, and the competition between manufacturers probably means there's not a whole lot of room for that price to vary. And I think everything gets repriced pretty frequently whenever anybody's costs move. You can see the prices change at the same time at different sellers. The reason I bought drives from Amazon was that I'd had Newegg delay delivery of an accepted order, and then cancel it for "lack of stock". A few days later Newegg had the same drives listed at a higher price. I assume that what they really meant was "lack of stock of the drives we bought cheaply".
trompetenaccoun 2y ago
One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much as possible or soon we can't trust anything anymore. Hard disks especially are one of the most critical components, you don't want failures there.
- rycomb 2y ago
  Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again. Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority of consumers don't drastically change their shopping habits when being abused.
  - mmmlinux 2y ago
    I had the same thing happen with a soldering iron bought from amazon. sold as brand new. clearly had been used and crammed back in the box.
  - IAmGraydon 2y ago
    I've had this experience with several big retailers recently. One is B&H, who sold me a "new" Focusrite 18i20 4th Gen last month which had clearly been opened, cosmetically damaged, and returned. I've also had this experience many times with Sweetwater (musical instruments retailer). There used to be a sales rep there who would participate in a particular musician's forum that I was a member of and would get us a slightly better price than is standard if we ordered through him directly. Many people who did so, including me, received what was clearly opened and returned items, sold as new. I assume they do this because the vast majority of people would rather not bother and will just accept a small defect.
Supercompressor 2y ago
The headline makes this out to be deception by Seagate but the article reads as if it's just one shady, but approved distributor who's sneaking these out as new drives.
- nness 2y ago
  I thought that part was unclear, too. This seems to be a particularly big issue on Amazon in Europe. So much so that certain NAS communities, like r/synology recommend to avoid Amazon for HDD purchases.
scrlk 2y ago
From the original heise.de article (https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dutzende-Leser-melden-Verdachtsfaelle-10258657.html https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dut...): > According to readers, various retailers supplied the hard drives, with Amazon, JB Computer, Mindfactory and Reichelt being mentioned in numerous cases. Others mentioned: Alternate, Böttcher, Büroshop 24, Galaxus, Jacob, Kosatec, Maingau and Proshop - some of which are on the list of official Seagate retailers. Given the number of affected retailers, I wonder if a distributor in Germany messed up somewhere.
- Tepix 2y ago
  "messed up"?
  - stronglikedan 2y ago
    accidentally sent out refurbs marked as new to retailers to sell as new
  - scrlk 2y ago
    My bet would be on someone in a warehouse mislabelling a pallet or something. Actual malice is a possibility, but it does seem odd to blow up an entire distribution business for some 16 TB HDDs, when HDDs aren't supply constrained at the moment. There were all sorts of shenanigans going on in 2020-21 when supply chains were disrupted (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-to-more-counterfeit-chips-and-devices/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-...).
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      >> It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.
      - deleted 2y ago
PaulHoule 2y ago
Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at prosumers are the exotic expensive products. It is senseless to me that vendors like WD make special SKUs for security camera use or for 2-3 bay NAS, 4-7 bay NAS, etc when all it means is Best Buy won't stock any of them, development costs are spread out over fewer units, more versions of firmware and hardware to have bugs, etc.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  > make special SKUs If your company is set up for it, special SKU's can be really cheap. Some can be software-only changes that even get applied after the product gets into the hands of the users. eg. during the setup process, the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer and figures out which features to enable. There might even be more SKU combinations than products have ever be produced. Not saying hard drive manufacturers do it, but it is both possible and done in some industries.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I was impressed in the 1980s when I heard about how 390 mainframes had a modem in them so IBM could phone in orders to unlock extra capacity if the customer needed it for a short time. Today I think that's a sign to sell the stock of the company involved. It costs money to build hardware that is locked out, either the customer pays for it or the stockholders of the vendor pay for it, if the customer doesn't get to use it it just wasted. A vendor that even considers value subtraction is on thin ice and can only get away with it because there are barriers to exit. (This is particularly true of "fused off" features in Intel chips.)
    - londons_explore 2y ago
behringer 2y ago
Had the same thing happen to me with an amazon seller and an ssd. I made sure to rough up the labeling on the device before sending it back.
Meneth 2y ago
I just tested my pair of Seagate drives. Their "Power-on Hours" are the same between SMART and FARM logs (via smartctl).
yobbo 2y ago
> The time used ranges from 15,000 to 36,000 hours except for two 4TB HDDs, which were both used for about 50,000 hours 20000 hours is more than 24 months. 50000 is five and half years. Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters.
- bombcar 2y ago
  I guess one way to avoid this would be only to buy drives that were released recently; a drive that first shipped in Dec 2024 can't be five and a half years old!
- rsync 2y ago
  "Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters." I would suspect CHIA miners. CHIA miners have long been known to reset SMART parameters for resale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436558 As that (absurd) project
mjw1007 2y ago
> 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 it wasn't] I had a look at how to run these FARM tests, and it seems I want smartctl 7.4 (which is too new for Debian stable but available in backports).
wumms 2y ago
You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using smartctl -l farm /dev/sd<n> They're supposed to be "more trustworthy" than the regular SMART stats. (My two "new" 16TB Exos drives had 0 hours (regular) and ~18k hours (farm) - DOM 04JUN2021 and 07JUN2021. Also, zfs refused to format the drive: 'already formatted as ddf_raid_member'.)
- angry_moose 2y ago
  Seems to require smartmontools 7.4 (August 2023) which at least Debian isn't including yet (7.3). Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.
  - jonatron 2y ago
    There's a backport https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartmontools https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartm...
    - leidenfrost 2y ago
      Having to install a backport of a version released one and half years ago is wild.
      - diggan 2y ago
        Favoring stability doesn't come without its drawbacks (nor without benefits).
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable
      - Lammy 2y ago
        That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.
      - 2y ago
jmakov 2y ago
Why should one care if they're still under warranty?
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  Because hard drives have a limited lifespan. If you buy the drive expecting it to last 5 years, and it's already been used for 1 year, that means you aren't getting what you paid for. Furthermore, for the customer, "the food might cost more than the freezer." Meaning, the work of changing the drive, restoring from backup, ect, ect, might cost more than the drive. Thus, it's "worth it" to expect a new drive. "The food might cost more than the freezer." IE, a few years ago I bought a chest freezer for $150, and put $500 worth of food in the freezer. If the freezer died prematurely, I'm out more than the value of the freezer due to lost food. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer will ship me a new freezer for free. Edit 2: I have a NAS in my basement, with drives paired in RAID. If a drive dies under warranty, will it be replaced with an identical drive? If the replacement is "equal or better," I'll have to pay to replace the other drive, because RAID drives should be identical. Likewise, replacing the drive is "time" to me: The time to contact the company, the time to open up the NAS, the time to wait for the new drive to be restored, the time to replace the other drive...
- toast0 2y ago
  For one thing, these drives aren't retail drives, and aren't covered by the retail warranty. Which is unexpected when you bought it in a retail environment. OEM drive warranty starts when originally sold, not whenever you purchased it, labeled as new. For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures. I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again. I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.
darknavi 2y ago
If you're looking for cheap bulk storage, refurbished/used is a great way to go. It'd just be nice if they told you that's what you were getting :) Shout out to https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Some of the ebay sellers are super honest with their product they are moving too. I saw a photo of a wd red, it looked like someone tried to destroy it with a blowtorch. But they could have easily lied and put up the wd stock product photo.
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Yeah esp with enterprise gear. Consumer stuff on eBay is more hit and miss
efitz 2y ago
This is specifically illegal in the US[1] (and probably everywhere). If this were in the US then it would be prudent for the buyer to contact the FTC[2] and their local state AG. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 [2] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
- gpvos 2y ago
  Which is why the article calls it fraud in the first line of the text.
  - voytec 2y ago
    Not to defend Seagate, but also: > Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.
    - snvzz 2y ago
      That sentence protects against defamation lawsuits.
hparadiz 2y ago
Had Seagate written off from bad experiences as a teen. Got one not long ago. Failed within 18 months. Yea not doing that again.
helpfulclippy 2y ago
Seagate’s entire warranty program seems to be a mess. Every time I have to deal with them I get this endless runaround where they demand ridiculous amounts of “proof” that the drive failed, or deny that the drive is under US warranty (bought it new in the US from Newegg). At one point I made it a mission to proactively correct the warranty records for the dozen or so Seagate drives I had in operation that had incorrect warranty terms showing in the RMA portal. Every day I’d contact them, give them my case number, and the customer service rep would “pull up the record” but still need me to list all the serial numbers again. Every couple tries, a few of the serials would get their warranties fixed. Towards the end they claimed that one of the drives was already returned as failed and destroyed by Seagate, and another one didn’t even exist. They made me literally pull the drives out of live systems and send them photos, and when I did, they continued with more excuses to not fix the warranty terms in the RMA portal. But I just tried again each day with a new rep, some of whom would fix some of the remaining drives, and eventually each drive got its warranty fixed. Another time, they sent me a failed drive as a replacement, so I had to RMA my RMA. They cross-shipped me a replacement, but then lost my return in their own depot and tried telling me they never got it and I needed to either get it delivered or pay them for it. Fuck Seagate.
busterarm 2y ago
Enterprise drives that make it into retail channels have been suspect for years and I've received used/dead drives from Amazon, Newegg, etc. pretty habitually. I pretty much only buy them from Newegg anymore if I have to buy retail and even then my return rate for receiving DOA drives is nearly 50%. Where I don't have this problem is buying via my server vendor contract w/ our Dell reseller. Buying enterprise drives through enterprise sales channels they always arrive new.
marcusb 2y ago
I had enough problems with new Seagate Exos drives (actually new, not remanufactured or whatever these folks ended up with,) that I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS. They're cheaper, and so far, reliable enough. I wrote a little more about my rationale[0], but, basically: 1. With RAID-6, I can take two drive failures, and it is quicker to get a replacement off Amazon than wait for an OEM to RMA a drive under warranty 2. The Ultrastars have been pretty reliable in Backblaze's published data 3. The reseller I went through seems reliable enough 4. There's at least some evidence these "remanufactured" drives are coming from the OEMs, and based on past experience working at a few hardware manufacturers, the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty. I guess a side benefit of this is at least I know I'm buying used drives. 0 - https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech-on-tech/ https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech...
- MisterTea 2y ago
  >4. ... the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty. Long ago, my friend worked for a Dell contractor (Unisys maybe) doing field service calls. His car would be full of swapped hardware, most of which would be thrown out. However, the hard drives had to be physically returned to his office. He gave me a bunch of stuff like a stack of eight working P4 motherboards, RAM, fans, CPU coolers, DVD drives, and so on. It all worked fine so I can totally see the disks making their way back into the supply chain via some shady contractor or recycler.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS. Same. I bought a bunch of 10TB HGST drives for my home NAS. They were $79 ($95 now) vs $325 new. I ran badblocks for 24H on each and found one dodgy one, which the seller swapped out. Last year I was buying new old stock 6TB Ultrastar SAS drives from B&H for $90 ea. They were a few years old with 0 hours. None of the drives showed any indication of use, ex: no witness marks. They're in a hotswap NAS.
brianbest101 2y ago
[dead]
wumms 2y ago
Has anyone had experience involving the police in matters like this? I reached out to the German news source that first reported on this issue, but they couldn’t help. The writer of the article mentioned that "The dealer will probably hide behind the supplier." Here's the response I received today from Böttcher AG, where I purchased the hard drives, after sending them the FARM logs and photos of the drives (translated from German): --- "Dear Sir or Madam, Attached you will find the manufacturer's feedback regarding your complaint: Please send the hard drives back. You will receive a credit immediately upon receipt. We are currently unable to provide a statement, as we need to first examine the hard drive and the situation. Therefore, please ask the customer to hand over the hard drive to you. You will promptly receive a refund of the purchase price and the shipping costs. As soon as we have a statement from our supplier, we will inform you immediately." --- Given this, I am wondering if anyone has dealt with a situation like this and whether it's worth involving the police to ensure compensation for the damages or if this process should be handled through other legal channels. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
- smelendez 2y ago
  I think in many countries you’d be better off reaching out to a consumer protection-specific agency or tribunal, making sure to cc the vendor or manufacturer. For instance, in the United States, you could contact the Federal Trade Commission or your state’s attorney general, or potentially file a case in small claims court if the matter isn’t quickly resolved. You might get a better response from regulators if you wait until you do have issues getting a refund, but that probably also between jurisdictions. Good luck!
BeetleB 2y ago
Years ago, a Seagate HD suddenly crashed. Wasn't particularly old. Then some point later, there was a good deal on Seagate HDs, and I bought another one. Also crashed "early" in its life. I never buy them again. The main PC building forum I used to frequent also have a pinned topic announcing that they've lost all hope with Seagate and will never recommend it for anyone asking for help on a build. That was 10 years ago, and last I checked they still stuck to that policy. Don't buy Seagate.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  I was a system builder from 1990 onward. Seagate's 10. and 11. lines were notorious for going bad. I have stacks of bad Seagate drives from those days (2010s, iirc). For 3.5 inch form factor models, Seagate drives were dying at a rate of 10x all other brands combined. The earliest HDD scandal I recall was when Seagate bough Conner, just as Conner's run of leaky-seals started eating platters. Seagate refused to honor those warranties for years. Something eventually changed. IDK what, I always assumed a court was involved. For non-Seagate drives: I did have a bunch of 500GB WD Blue SSDs die a couple of years back. I replaced some under warranty; I later found a firmware update restored the rest of them.
- beAbU 2y ago
  One of their drives was famously so unreliable that it has its own wikipedia page [1]. Guess who had two of these fail almost at the same time in his NAS a couple of years back. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
  - xen2xen1 2y ago
    Had 4 of the 5000 version of the models. Quickly moved to other drives. Got lucky.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  Thanks. What do you buy nowadays? I mostly use them to backup family photos and videos. Frequent ingestion but few actual reads. And I hope they can last at least 10 years so I'll rotate another in 5-8 years.
andreldm 2y ago
This reminded me the time I bought a brand new HDD only to notice at home it was labelled as “refurbished”, next day I returned it, they guys from the shop didn’t want to admit this wasn’t a new part, after much back and forth they agreed to refund me. If my memory serves me well that was a Seagate drive, I hope they didn’t become sloppy with labelling.
brikym 2y ago
What do you call a scandal when the company name already ends in 'gate? Seagategate?
scotty79 2y ago
I won't ever touch Segate because at one point they released 3TB hdds that were failing catastrophically in 1-2 years of desktop use. I've lost some stuff I shouldn't have.

383 points by 6581 2y ago

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

baobun 2y ago
> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? WDs image was IIRC already not the best when the WD Red SMR thing blew up. I recall feeling smug but forget the background. I think they have a strong claim on title of most scandalous HDD maker.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Does any WD model have its own Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 (I had one, it died just after its warranty ended but Seagate did send me a replacement after bitching about it for long enough.)
  - knute 2y ago
    There's an IBM Deathstar (sold to Hitachi, sold to WD) model that has its own section, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      Lost my first 3 years of programming thanks to a Deathstar... Still miffed about it, as I enjoy going back looking at my earlier code. At least I learned to take backups, which has saved my butt several times since.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - baobun 2y ago
    I agree it's not an easy call between the two! I guess the conclusion of this episode could tip the scales, if we ever get an explanation. My best guesses right now are some mix of organized crime disrupting their German distribution and/or less publically acknowledged graymarket/OEM channels gone wrong. If it really comes from inside Seagate I don't think a sane person would buy from them again. It gets more nuanced when talking about their responsibility to keep oversight over their supply chains and distribution.
  - rasz 2y ago
    They both competed for worst drive :) https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-archived/amstrad-loses-us-hard-disk-lawsuit-1999-06/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar... " Western Digital supplied it with faulty disk drives during 1988 and 1989"
- account42 2y ago
  It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.
diggan 2y ago
> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising? Feels like a rite of passage for HDD sellers to somehow defraud consumers sooner or later.
- jerf 2y ago
  "AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite." Claiming you're selling a new product and then selling a used product is straight-up fraud. This isn't even a warrantee issue, and no, the US legal system wouldn't just shrug and go "Oh well". This is the sort of thing that penetrates any amount of verbiage in a EULA the company may throw at you, including any sort of demand to go through arbitration, and depending on how widespread this is could easily become class-action, which is the corporate nightmare the forced-arbitration clauses are trying to avoid. You can't write yourself an open-ended right to commit basic fraud into any contract, no, not even in the US.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    Class actions are for lawyers. They will lowball how much damage was done and consumers will see $6 once all is said and done. I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.
    - jerf 2y ago
      You'll note I called it a "corporate nightmare" and didn't describe as anything like the white horse coming to the rescue of the consumer.
- immibis 2y ago
  Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
fred_is_fred 2y ago
It's not clear to me that this is Seagate's fault. Sounds like retailers are selling used drives as new. Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do? I buy used enterprise drives for large home NAS and some Amazon "refurb" sellers will wipe SMART data, inc drive hours. I avoid them. It's a dumb thing to do for a known, used drive.
Joker_vD 2y ago
> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? Since you can't make an "X-gate" name for a scandal out of the Seagate's name, they can afford more bad publicity than other hard drive manufacturers. Truly an ingenious branding strategy.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Circa 2001 or so I bought about 5 Maxtor drives that all went bad in a year and I wasn't the only one. I never bought another Maxtor drive again. On the other hand, I've owned probably 20 Seagate drives and had maybe 1 fail, so I see them as a partner as much as a aprt.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    Seagate acquired Maxtor and that's when people started complaining about Seagate reliability
bluGill 2y ago
there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)
- danparsonson 2y ago
  The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    >My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble. This is, emphatically, not a good data point. You need thousands of drives running for years under normal loads to actually tease out outlier failure rates in a drive SKU. You need to literally do what Backblaze does.
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      I know, that's why I didn't say "you should buy these drives because I've never had any failures". I was just adding some context.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  I'm a die-hard Ultrastar fan who was disappointed by their eventual sale to WD. But, for a sample size of 8 over a decade, I've been happy with my Toshiba laptop 2TB drives I have running in a small storage server.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- busterarm 2y ago
toast0 2y ago
> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? It's either Seagate, Western Digital, or the rotating third player in the market, but there haven't really been any other options for scanadals. I can't remember the last time the third player had a big scandal, but WD certainly goes through them from time to time. IBM DeskStar is a name that will live in infamy, but that was from before rotational drives really consolidated.
teekert 2y ago
I avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.

quesera 2y ago

Article is about reports from German customers (this is clear in the orignal title, but not the current HN title), and mostly with 16TB Exos HDDs. FWIW, I just bought a bunch of Seagate HDDs (US vendor) and my warranty periods line up with the DOMs on the packaging. You can check your warranty period/status at: https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements

nbernard 2y ago
Thanks! I just checked an 10TB Ironwolf bought to a German seller through Amazon.fr less than two months ago: Its warranty expires in a few days... :(
- JAlexoid 2y ago
  From what I see, the majority of HDDs on Amazon are now used devices. Which isn't necessarily bad... HDDs have a much longer lifespan than SSDs. I expect my used HDDs to last at least 5years in my RAID5 setup.
  - xnorswap 2y ago
    How is listing used devices as new "not necessarily bad"? It's fraud.
    - quesera 2y ago
      Amazon sells both "new" and "refurbished" HDDs. They are clearly marked in the description, but this is often awkwardly-conveniently after the truncation point for search results listings, so you need to be vigilant. In contrast, the article is about used devices sold as new, and with SMART counters reset. That absolutely smells like fraud -- though to be fair, I can concoct at plausible sequence of errors and omissions that arrives at the same result. I expect that someone with subpoena power will need to take it from here.
      - deleted 2y ago

Hamuko 2y ago

I've recently been browsing Amazon.de listings for a new HDD and I'm pretty sure I saw someone complain about their supposedly new Seagate EXOS already having hours on it. I also saw listings for SATA drives where the reviews were complaining about receiving SAS drives and complaints about bare HDDs being shipped rattling around in large cardboard boxes. I think the only conclusion I reached was that I should buy my HDD from somewhere that is not Amazon. Impossible to tell if they're selling a new or refurbished drive, a SATA or SAS drive or if it'll make it here safely.

Cerium 2y ago
Why buy any drives from Amazon? I always buy from a specialty dealer. Where I am that's usually B&H.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Well you see, the website that lets third parties sell used drives as new always offers the best prices on "new" drives :)
- toast0 2y ago
  It's always more exciting to put your important data on a drive that's been shipped in a box that's much too big for it, with much too little packing material.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Amazon has usually always been the cheapest option, especially compared to a specialty dealer. Costs add up when you're buying many drives.
  - Hizonner 2y ago
    Whenever I've looked, prices at B&H, or Newegg sold by Newegg, are usually within a few dollars of prices from any Amazon sellers that don't look obviously skeezy. It's a few dollars lower as often as it's a few dollars higher. Except, of course, for the dramatically cheaper drives you find from Amazon... which are definitely going to be used, defective, dropped, or fake. If you get them at all. They all seem to be selling them for very close to what they pay Seagate (or WD or whoever) for them, and the competition between manufacturers probably means there's not a whole lot of room for that price to vary. And I think everything gets repriced pretty frequently whenever anybody's costs move. You can see the prices change at the same time at different sellers. The reason I bought drives from Amazon was that I'd had Newegg delay delivery of an accepted order, and then cancel it for "lack of stock". A few days later Newegg had the same drives listed at a higher price. I assume that what they really meant was "lack of stock of the drives we bought cheaply".

trompetenaccoun 2y ago

One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much as possible or soon we can't trust anything anymore. Hard disks especially are one of the most critical components, you don't want failures there.

rycomb 2y ago
Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again. Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority of consumers don't drastically change their shopping habits when being abused.
- mmmlinux 2y ago
  I had the same thing happen with a soldering iron bought from amazon. sold as brand new. clearly had been used and crammed back in the box.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  I've had this experience with several big retailers recently. One is B&H, who sold me a "new" Focusrite 18i20 4th Gen last month which had clearly been opened, cosmetically damaged, and returned. I've also had this experience many times with Sweetwater (musical instruments retailer). There used to be a sales rep there who would participate in a particular musician's forum that I was a member of and would get us a slightly better price than is standard if we ordered through him directly. Many people who did so, including me, received what was clearly opened and returned items, sold as new. I assume they do this because the vast majority of people would rather not bother and will just accept a small defect.

Supercompressor 2y ago

The headline makes this out to be deception by Seagate but the article reads as if it's just one shady, but approved distributor who's sneaking these out as new drives.

nness 2y ago
I thought that part was unclear, too. This seems to be a particularly big issue on Amazon in Europe. So much so that certain NAS communities, like r/synology recommend to avoid Amazon for HDD purchases.

scrlk 2y ago

From the original heise.de article (https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dutzende-Leser-melden-Verdachtsfaelle-10258657.html https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dut...): > According to readers, various retailers supplied the hard drives, with Amazon, JB Computer, Mindfactory and Reichelt being mentioned in numerous cases. Others mentioned: Alternate, Böttcher, Büroshop 24, Galaxus, Jacob, Kosatec, Maingau and Proshop - some of which are on the list of official Seagate retailers. Given the number of affected retailers, I wonder if a distributor in Germany messed up somewhere.

Tepix 2y ago
"messed up"?
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  accidentally sent out refurbs marked as new to retailers to sell as new
- scrlk 2y ago
  My bet would be on someone in a warehouse mislabelling a pallet or something. Actual malice is a possibility, but it does seem odd to blow up an entire distribution business for some 16 TB HDDs, when HDDs aren't supply constrained at the moment. There were all sorts of shenanigans going on in 2020-21 when supply chains were disrupted (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-to-more-counterfeit-chips-and-devices/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-...).
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    >> It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.
    - deleted 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago

Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at prosumers are the exotic expensive products. It is senseless to me that vendors like WD make special SKUs for security camera use or for 2-3 bay NAS, 4-7 bay NAS, etc when all it means is Best Buy won't stock any of them, development costs are spread out over fewer units, more versions of firmware and hardware to have bugs, etc.

londons_explore 2y ago
> make special SKUs If your company is set up for it, special SKU's can be really cheap. Some can be software-only changes that even get applied after the product gets into the hands of the users. eg. during the setup process, the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer and figures out which features to enable. There might even be more SKU combinations than products have ever be produced. Not saying hard drive manufacturers do it, but it is both possible and done in some industries.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I was impressed in the 1980s when I heard about how 390 mainframes had a modem in them so IBM could phone in orders to unlock extra capacity if the customer needed it for a short time. Today I think that's a sign to sell the stock of the company involved. It costs money to build hardware that is locked out, either the customer pays for it or the stockholders of the vendor pay for it, if the customer doesn't get to use it it just wasted. A vendor that even considers value subtraction is on thin ice and can only get away with it because there are barriers to exit. (This is particularly true of "fused off" features in Intel chips.)
  - londons_explore 2y ago

behringer 2y ago

Had the same thing happen to me with an amazon seller and an ssd. I made sure to rough up the labeling on the device before sending it back.

Meneth 2y ago

I just tested my pair of Seagate drives. Their "Power-on Hours" are the same between SMART and FARM logs (via smartctl).

yobbo 2y ago

> The time used ranges from 15,000 to 36,000 hours except for two 4TB HDDs, which were both used for about 50,000 hours 20000 hours is more than 24 months. 50000 is five and half years. Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters.

bombcar 2y ago
I guess one way to avoid this would be only to buy drives that were released recently; a drive that first shipped in Dec 2024 can't be five and a half years old!
rsync 2y ago
"Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters." I would suspect CHIA miners. CHIA miners have long been known to reset SMART parameters for resale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436558 As that (absurd) project

mjw1007 2y ago

> 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 it wasn't] I had a look at how to run these FARM tests, and it seems I want smartctl 7.4 (which is too new for Debian stable but available in backports).

wumms 2y ago

You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using smartctl -l farm /dev/sd<n> They're supposed to be "more trustworthy" than the regular SMART stats. (My two "new" 16TB Exos drives had 0 hours (regular) and ~18k hours (farm) - DOM 04JUN2021 and 07JUN2021. Also, zfs refused to format the drive: 'already formatted as ddf_raid_member'.)

angry_moose 2y ago
Seems to require smartmontools 7.4 (August 2023) which at least Debian isn't including yet (7.3). Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.
- jonatron 2y ago
  There's a backport https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartmontools https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartm...
  - leidenfrost 2y ago
    Having to install a backport of a version released one and half years ago is wild.
    - diggan 2y ago
      Favoring stability doesn't come without its drawbacks (nor without benefits).
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable
    - Lammy 2y ago
      That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.
    - 2y ago

jmakov 2y ago

Why should one care if they're still under warranty?

gwbas1c 2y ago
Because hard drives have a limited lifespan. If you buy the drive expecting it to last 5 years, and it's already been used for 1 year, that means you aren't getting what you paid for. Furthermore, for the customer, "the food might cost more than the freezer." Meaning, the work of changing the drive, restoring from backup, ect, ect, might cost more than the drive. Thus, it's "worth it" to expect a new drive. "The food might cost more than the freezer." IE, a few years ago I bought a chest freezer for $150, and put $500 worth of food in the freezer. If the freezer died prematurely, I'm out more than the value of the freezer due to lost food. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer will ship me a new freezer for free. Edit 2: I have a NAS in my basement, with drives paired in RAID. If a drive dies under warranty, will it be replaced with an identical drive? If the replacement is "equal or better," I'll have to pay to replace the other drive, because RAID drives should be identical. Likewise, replacing the drive is "time" to me: The time to contact the company, the time to open up the NAS, the time to wait for the new drive to be restored, the time to replace the other drive...
toast0 2y ago
For one thing, these drives aren't retail drives, and aren't covered by the retail warranty. Which is unexpected when you bought it in a retail environment. OEM drive warranty starts when originally sold, not whenever you purchased it, labeled as new. For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures. I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again. I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.

darknavi 2y ago

If you're looking for cheap bulk storage, refurbished/used is a great way to go. It'd just be nice if they told you that's what you were getting :) Shout out to https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/

kjkjadksj 2y ago
Some of the ebay sellers are super honest with their product they are moving too. I saw a photo of a wd red, it looked like someone tried to destroy it with a blowtorch. But they could have easily lied and put up the wd stock product photo.
- Havoc 2y ago
  Yeah esp with enterprise gear. Consumer stuff on eBay is more hit and miss

efitz 2y ago

This is specifically illegal in the US[1] (and probably everywhere). If this were in the US then it would be prudent for the buyer to contact the FTC[2] and their local state AG. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 [2] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

gpvos 2y ago
Which is why the article calls it fraud in the first line of the text.
- voytec 2y ago
  Not to defend Seagate, but also: > Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    That sentence protects against defamation lawsuits.

hparadiz 2y ago

Had Seagate written off from bad experiences as a teen. Got one not long ago. Failed within 18 months. Yea not doing that again.

helpfulclippy 2y ago

Seagate’s entire warranty program seems to be a mess. Every time I have to deal with them I get this endless runaround where they demand ridiculous amounts of “proof” that the drive failed, or deny that the drive is under US warranty (bought it new in the US from Newegg). At one point I made it a mission to proactively correct the warranty records for the dozen or so Seagate drives I had in operation that had incorrect warranty terms showing in the RMA portal. Every day I’d contact them, give them my case number, and the customer service rep would “pull up the record” but still need me to list all the serial numbers again. Every couple tries, a few of the serials would get their warranties fixed. Towards the end they claimed that one of the drives was already returned as failed and destroyed by Seagate, and another one didn’t even exist. They made me literally pull the drives out of live systems and send them photos, and when I did, they continued with more excuses to not fix the warranty terms in the RMA portal. But I just tried again each day with a new rep, some of whom would fix some of the remaining drives, and eventually each drive got its warranty fixed. Another time, they sent me a failed drive as a replacement, so I had to RMA my RMA. They cross-shipped me a replacement, but then lost my return in their own depot and tried telling me they never got it and I needed to either get it delivered or pay them for it. Fuck Seagate.

busterarm 2y ago

Enterprise drives that make it into retail channels have been suspect for years and I've received used/dead drives from Amazon, Newegg, etc. pretty habitually. I pretty much only buy them from Newegg anymore if I have to buy retail and even then my return rate for receiving DOA drives is nearly 50%. Where I don't have this problem is buying via my server vendor contract w/ our Dell reseller. Buying enterprise drives through enterprise sales channels they always arrive new.

marcusb 2y ago

I had enough problems with new Seagate Exos drives (actually new, not remanufactured or whatever these folks ended up with,) that I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS. They're cheaper, and so far, reliable enough. I wrote a little more about my rationale[0], but, basically: 1. With RAID-6, I can take two drive failures, and it is quicker to get a replacement off Amazon than wait for an OEM to RMA a drive under warranty 2. The Ultrastars have been pretty reliable in Backblaze's published data 3. The reseller I went through seems reliable enough 4. There's at least some evidence these "remanufactured" drives are coming from the OEMs, and based on past experience working at a few hardware manufacturers, the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty. I guess a side benefit of this is at least I know I'm buying used drives. 0 - https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech-on-tech/ https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech...

MisterTea 2y ago
>4. ... the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty. Long ago, my friend worked for a Dell contractor (Unisys maybe) doing field service calls. His car would be full of swapped hardware, most of which would be thrown out. However, the hard drives had to be physically returned to his office. He gave me a bunch of stuff like a stack of eight working P4 motherboards, RAM, fans, CPU coolers, DVD drives, and so on. It all worked fine so I can totally see the disks making their way back into the supply chain via some shady contractor or recycler.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS. Same. I bought a bunch of 10TB HGST drives for my home NAS. They were $79 ($95 now) vs $325 new. I ran badblocks for 24H on each and found one dodgy one, which the seller swapped out. Last year I was buying new old stock 6TB Ultrastar SAS drives from B&H for $90 ea. They were a few years old with 0 hours. None of the drives showed any indication of use, ex: no witness marks. They're in a hotswap NAS.

brianbest101 2y ago

[dead]

wumms 2y ago

Has anyone had experience involving the police in matters like this? I reached out to the German news source that first reported on this issue, but they couldn’t help. The writer of the article mentioned that "The dealer will probably hide behind the supplier." Here's the response I received today from Böttcher AG, where I purchased the hard drives, after sending them the FARM logs and photos of the drives (translated from German): --- "Dear Sir or Madam, Attached you will find the manufacturer's feedback regarding your complaint: Please send the hard drives back. You will receive a credit immediately upon receipt. We are currently unable to provide a statement, as we need to first examine the hard drive and the situation. Therefore, please ask the customer to hand over the hard drive to you. You will promptly receive a refund of the purchase price and the shipping costs. As soon as we have a statement from our supplier, we will inform you immediately." --- Given this, I am wondering if anyone has dealt with a situation like this and whether it's worth involving the police to ensure compensation for the damages or if this process should be handled through other legal channels. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!

smelendez 2y ago
I think in many countries you’d be better off reaching out to a consumer protection-specific agency or tribunal, making sure to cc the vendor or manufacturer. For instance, in the United States, you could contact the Federal Trade Commission or your state’s attorney general, or potentially file a case in small claims court if the matter isn’t quickly resolved. You might get a better response from regulators if you wait until you do have issues getting a refund, but that probably also between jurisdictions. Good luck!

BeetleB 2y ago

Years ago, a Seagate HD suddenly crashed. Wasn't particularly old. Then some point later, there was a good deal on Seagate HDs, and I bought another one. Also crashed "early" in its life. I never buy them again. The main PC building forum I used to frequent also have a pinned topic announcing that they've lost all hope with Seagate and will never recommend it for anyone asking for help on a build. That was 10 years ago, and last I checked they still stuck to that policy. Don't buy Seagate.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
I was a system builder from 1990 onward. Seagate's 10. and 11. lines were notorious for going bad. I have stacks of bad Seagate drives from those days (2010s, iirc). For 3.5 inch form factor models, Seagate drives were dying at a rate of 10x all other brands combined. The earliest HDD scandal I recall was when Seagate bough Conner, just as Conner's run of leaky-seals started eating platters. Seagate refused to honor those warranties for years. Something eventually changed. IDK what, I always assumed a court was involved. For non-Seagate drives: I did have a bunch of 500GB WD Blue SSDs die a couple of years back. I replaced some under warranty; I later found a firmware update restored the rest of them.
beAbU 2y ago
One of their drives was famously so unreliable that it has its own wikipedia page [1]. Guess who had two of these fail almost at the same time in his NAS a couple of years back. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
- xen2xen1 2y ago
  Had 4 of the 5000 version of the models. Quickly moved to other drives. Got lucky.
markus_zhang 2y ago
Thanks. What do you buy nowadays? I mostly use them to backup family photos and videos. Frequent ingestion but few actual reads. And I hope they can last at least 10 years so I'll rotate another in 5-8 years.

andreldm 2y ago

This reminded me the time I bought a brand new HDD only to notice at home it was labelled as “refurbished”, next day I returned it, they guys from the shop didn’t want to admit this wasn’t a new part, after much back and forth they agreed to refund me. If my memory serves me well that was a Seagate drive, I hope they didn’t become sloppy with labelling.

brikym 2y ago

What do you call a scandal when the company name already ends in 'gate? Seagategate?

scotty79 2y ago

I won't ever touch Segate because at one point they released 3TB hdds that were failing catastrophically in 1-2 years of desktop use. I've lost some stuff I shouldn't have.