- Seagate denies involvement in fraudulent HDD resales.
- Patrons can examine Seagate HDD utilization historical past utilizing related instruments.
- Retailers are providing some kind of compensation.
Seagate laborious drives that have been beforehand utilized in Chinese language Chia cryptocurrency mining farms have been resold as new by unsuspecting retailers.
An investigation by Heise signifies giant portions of high-mileage drives have surfaced out there, notably in Europe, Australia, Thailand, and Japan.
These drives, usually datacenter-grade Seagate Exos fashions, have been discovered with hundreds of operational hours regardless of being marketed as model new.
Chia farms and the flood of second-hand drives
On the peak of the cryptocurrency growth, mining operations required huge storage capability, resulting in a surge in demand for high-end HDDs. Nevertheless, because the profitability of Chia mining declined, many farms shut down and bought their {hardware}. These laborious drives have been then repackaged and reintroduced into the market, deceiving prospects.
Involved patrons can confirm the true utilization historical past of their Seagate HDDs utilizing particular diagnostic instruments. Whereas SMART parameters will be reset to cover prior use, the FARM (field-accessible reliability metrics) values present a extra correct report.
Customers can examine these values by working the command smartctl -l farm /dev/sda in Smartmontools model 7.4 or increased or by utilizing Seagate’s personal Seatools software program to examine the drive’s operational historical past.
Seagate has said it solely distributes real laborious drives via official channel, and it suspects these used HDDs entered the secondary market earlier than reaching shoppers.
Nonetheless, It has additionally launched a full-scale investigation and has urged affected patrons to report any suspicious purchases to fraud@seagate.com.
Affected retailers are firefighting the difficulty, with Galaxus creating on-line assist pages for affected prospects, whereas Proshop is providing free returns and replacements. Alternate, a German retailer, denies prior data of the difficulty however has inspired prospects to report used drives. Wortmann, alternatively, insists on verifying HDDs earlier than providing compensation.
Through TomsHardware