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Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop
- JSR_FDED 1y agoI read that there were two identical workshops right next to each other, and that they needed to raid both of them to make absolutely sure.
- washadjeffmad 1y agoThe planning report had a lot of good details, like how the teams should consider neither raid to be their backup.
- JSR_FDED 1y agoI don’t think they had a backup plan
- clickety_clack 1y agoDid they say how they dealt with corruption?
- Fade_Dance 1y agoThat bit was missing.
- clickety_clack 1y agoThank god they had the right address then.
- HPsquared 1y agoThey need to get accounting to check the sums.
- kotaKat 1y agoI thought the law enforcement was just converting the array of crimes into a RAID 5-0 configuration.
- cm2187 1y agowhere did you raid that?
- catlikesshrimp 1y agoThere is clearly no redundancy check in their procedures.
- xattt 1y agoI expect this headline from The Inquirer (rip) but not THG.
- mschuster91 1y ago[flagged]
- protimewaster 1y agoThe excitement with Chia was really something else. It was supposed to be the "green" crypto, because crypto is in a bad enough state that "buying exabytes of hard drives" is considered the green approach. I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
- gruez 1y ago>I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting? Mining profits always trends towards zero. To make actual money (or any at all), you need massive economies of scale, lean operations, and advantages compared to your competitor (eg. cheap source of HDDs or electricity).
- ndriscoll 1y agoYou can get refurb drives for $10/TB, so if you had cheap electricity or excess solar or something and somehow had the network connection to receive that data in a reasonable time, that's over a 10% annual "dividend yield". Not bad at all.
- HPsquared 1y agoThere are probably better ways to many money from cheap electricity.
- pessimizer 1y agoYou'd have to calculate this in drive-hours for it to make sense at all. Those drives won't last long enough to pay for themselves at that rate, even assuming that the per TB return on this failing cryptocurrency that you hear nothing about remains steady for a decade.
- VoodooJuJu 1y ago[dead]
- BeetleB 1y agoDid they discover that the counterfeits were more reliable than their own drives?
- MrGilbert 1y agoThey are their drives. They are reset and re-sold as new.
- rsync 1y agoThe supply chain - especially for SSDs - is full of old parts being sold as new: https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/ https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/ ... some vendors have been found tampering with SMART data which can be done on certain models ... In the post-chia[1] landscape, I would advise extreme caution in sourcing drives and a decent shortcut is to not buy from Amazon ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network
- dehrmann 1y agoI recently bought some 8TB SSDs that were obviously Samsungs, but had no serial or capacity label. They came at a steep discount, so some shenanigans were expected, and they're in a mirrored setup, so my data is safe-ish. I just have no idea why they're missing the labels.
- simmerup 1y agoI'm very paranoid but I wouldn't want the responsibility of a databrack which I didn't know the history of. Anything could be on there
- pessimizer 1y agoFirst thing I (and a lot of people) do with a drive is encrypt the volume and write zeros to the entire thing. Otherwise, you're leaking information about how much is on them after you encrypt them for your own needs. Once they've been "erased" they're ready to use (or give away to friends.) edit: of course who knows what's on the hardware, but I haven't heard of the exploit that would doom me.
- MrGilbert 1y agoThe original Heise news in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-Arrests-in-Malaysia-10535171.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-A...
- mdip 1y agoThis is interesting, it really sounds like they were running a pretty normal salvage operation with the evil twist of "they were selling the salvaged drives as new" -- kinda feels like dialing back the odometer on a car. Barring that "evil twist", they'd not be doing anything all that uncommon/illegal but refurbished hard drives and the companies that sell them have been a bit scammy/"buyer beware" hardware for as long as I can remember. Back in the early 90s, I spent a year saving up for and building the best 486 PC I could buy. I went with a 330MB[0] SCSI drive that I picked up from a small magazine advertisement in Computer Shopper. They advertised it as refurbished, and there was no such thing as SMART parameters to reset (were there even counters of any kind back then, I can't remember?) so there was no way to tell how long it had been used except for the price. These were more than half off. It seemed shady, the price was still several hundred dollars (though, I want to say something like $500 off of the cheapest new option) and being a dumb teenager, I called the number and placed the order. My heart sunk a bit when it arrived. If memory serves, this was the one that came with all but one of the threaded screw slots completely stripped (of the four I needed to use given my case). Technically, they were all stripped, but one of them still had the screw -- left behind, evidently, because it became welded to the hole. After some delicate work with a metal file, I got it all installed and nothing worked. So I called the manufacturer who took about ten seconds to find the problem: That's a Differential SCSI drive. It took another few minutes for him to explain what that meant. There was no mention of this in the advertisement (they didn't even include the model number, just "330GB SCSI DRIVES!" I think these were common in AS/400s or something along those lines. fsck. So ... I bought a differential SCSI controller, cable and terminator, which set me back more than half of the savings from the drive. Because, as a teenager, I hadn't learned about the sunk cost fallacy. I hadn't appreciated, then, what a miracle it was that when everything was plugged in correctly, it all worked and continued to work until I upgraded the drive. The thing was extremely loud (occasionally making a unique sound similar to when wood hits a circular saw, like the magnetic head was grinding off some of the platter -- given its size, it had plenty of room to chisel the bits onto the surface ...). It was a massive heat source for not just the case, but the room. But it served my stupid BBS for several years, somehow. [0] It's been so long, I may not have that capacity right. It was 3-4 times what was typical at that time (I ran a BBS with file"z"). It was a 5.25" drive that required a full height slot (it was about 3/4 full height) to give you an idea.
- flufluflufluffy 1y agoFull headline: “Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop — authorities read criminals' writes while they spill the beans” The writer waited his entire life for this moment xD
- dleary 1y agoThat headline is a stunning achievement. I honestly wish there were some way to better call attention to it. I would have missed it if it weren't for your comment.
- gjvc 1y agoi'll include the full headline as the first comment next time i come across a long one.
- thebruce87m 1y agoMy favourite headlines over the years: “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Caley_go_ballistic,_Celtic_are_atrocious https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Caley_go_ballistic,_Ce... And “Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050300374_pf.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
- hinkley 1y agoI can only read this in the style of the radio announcer in the musical Annie. Thank you, Bert Healy.
- bogeholm 1y agoAgree - a magnificent headline, and they really seized the day with raid ;)
- rconti 1y agoSounds like they found quite the cache of counterfeit drives.
- phyzome 1y agoI feel like we need a different word from "counterfeit" here -- they're real Seagate drives, after all.
- dataflow 1y agoI'm confused by Seagate's response. Why didn't they focus on making the SMART data tamper-proof?
- rootsudo 1y agoIt feels the writer is trying to hard. If you’ve used shoppe/lazada, it’s not hard to see the return address on the site or the package. And organized criminality is unlikely, more or less ewaste recycler got a ton of hdds, wants to maximize, hired people to do the physical and not be around. If that’s organized criminal activity akin to how the writer described it.. eh it’s really weak. More fraud happens on eBay daily and I haven’t heard any of this go down in the USA … But yeah resetting smart values bad. To write as if it’s the next cartel driven industry, no.
- viratns 1y ago[dead]
- viratns 1y ago[dead]