There's a little serial port in the header of every Seagate drive. I have connected to it. Documentation is easy to find online. There's commands giving access

There's a little serial port in the header of every Seagate drive. I have connected to it. Documentation is easy to find online. There's commands giving access to a lot of functionality. Modifying SMART values is trivially done. Thus, they likely wrote a script that gets the job done in seconds. Attach device to hdd and remove when LED turns red. Done, next. Seagate could make this a little harder, but hasn't. This is likely the case only because nobody has abused this at a scale before.