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

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

#101

Post by mmmlinux »

rycomb wrote: post #16
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #8

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…

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…

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.

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

#102

Post by nness »

Supercompressor wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

#103

Post by nness »

Hizonner wrote: post #9
Hamuko wrote: post #7

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…

I got a couple of outright counterfeit 12TB Ironwolf drives from "AlamCh Trading Inc" on Amazon a couple of months ago. Slipped up and didn't notice that I was buying from an obviously suspicious seller. They did refund them... after being appropriately threatened.

Curiously, how did you identify them as counterfeit? (maybe they were much quieter than normal)

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

quesera wrote: post #99
xnorswap wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is listing used devices as new "not necessarily bad"? It's fraud.

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 omissi…

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by compootr »

londons_explore wrote: post #35
PaulHoule wrote: post #30

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…

> 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 t…

> the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer

laughs in linux

my drives have physical extra pins that make it disable itself with a normal SATA connector that's left unplugged in its plastic case

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

#106

Post by LeFantome »

PaulHoule wrote: post #30

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…

Surveillance represents a pretty big market though and the OEMs are not getting them from Best Buy.

Most storage workloads read more than they write. Surveillance is the opposite. You are always writing. Much ( maybe almost all ) of what you write is never used and is simply overwritten again.

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

#107

Post by gpvos »

efitz wrote: post #94

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 [2] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

Which is why the article calls it fraud in the first line of the text.

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

#108

Post by londons_explore »

PaulHoule wrote: post #49
londons_explore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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 us…

When you look deep enough, nearly all 'tech' products costs are IP. For IP, it costs nothing to include a feature locked out.

Even real hardware is usually like this. An expensive camera is probably only expensive because it had more R&D go into it and all of its components. The actual sand to make the silicon chips didn't cost any extra.

Unfortunately, the way todays capitalist society works, it's pretty hard to say "I'd like to buy 1 million of your camera sensors please, and I'd like to have 200k of them be high performance and 800k be kinda noisy, but I'll let you know which are the high performance ones after I sell them".

A really vertically integrated company like Apple could do it though - and they do, selling super high performance chips in cheap iPads, but software locked to not run a decent desktop OS - for that you have to buy a macbook with the same chip for triple the money.

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

#109

Post by bityard »

rycomb wrote: post #16
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #8

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…

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…

So I'm going to do something I don't normally do and defend Amazon only a little bit...

What likely happened was that somebody had an old and broken Rode mic and decided to scam Amazon. They purchased a new one, put the old one in the new packaging, and sent it in as a return with "ordered by mistake" or some other reason that doesn't indicate a broken or faulty item.

Amazon warehouse employees certainly don't (and never can) check out every return item for full functionality. My guess is that at the most, they make sure it's not just an empty box or a brick.

So, the only signal that Amazon has about whether to restock the item again is what the buyer stated for a return reason. If they tell the truth, they might get someone to take a closer look at the item and decide that it's not actually new. If they lie, they are both scamming Amazon and the next buyer.

Amazon _could_ treat _all_ returns as defective and destroy the returned items (historically how many brick-and-mortar retailers did it), but given their generous return policies, this probably means quite a big hit to their bottom line.

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

#110

Post by PaulHoule »

monkpit wrote: post #88
PaulHoule wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly concerned about the power cord getting unplugged if, say, somebody is vacuuming around the area. On top of the usual "whole machine gets turned off" failure mode that happens maybe 10-20x a year in my neighborhood because of power loss there is a "machine is turned on but HDD is powered off" case.

Wouldn’t a NAS have the same problem, and wouldn’t a battery backup solve it? Genuinely curious

Personally I don't trust a NAS as far as I can throw it, or rather I'd use one the way I use Amazon S3.

My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly. If I want to move files to or from it I use SFTP. If I want to back files up to it I use rsync. I have Lightroom running pretty good on an external HDD, no way I'd take my chances running it on a NAS.

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