Fraudulent Seagate Drives

Only just noticed these articles at Toms Hardware; made me think of @Bangers thread last month in search of cheap drives.

Fraudulent hard drive scandal deepens at Seagate: Clues point at Chinese Chia mining farms

Seagate's fraudulent HDD scandal expands: IronWolf Pro hard drives reportedly also affected

Pretty appalling the lengths fraudsters will go to! But at least there is another series of metrics on these drives they haven’t been able to erase.

There has been discussion in the Ubiquiti forum about "new" drives failing on initial install with several users reporting teh same issues. Sourcing a new drive direct from UI resolved it in each case which suggests the possibility of used drives being passed off as new.

I always buy my drives from known companies, Ebuyer and Scan normally, dealt with them both for years.
I did buy my last external drive from Argos, but should be able to trust them

I douibt I will be buying another hard drive to be honest, unless one fails

That’s been my experience too with both those companies. There’s a lot of risk sourcing truly genuine stuff via for example via eBay these days 👍

It does make you wonder where the rotten eggs in the supply chain are…

The report points at China and ex-mining drives.

When I was looking at some 16TB surveillance drives there were plenty of refurbished ones complete with "guarantee" and not much cheaper than a new one and often the "refurbished" statement was well hidden.

Needless to say, I went for a new from a trusted source - currently at over 18500 hour of continuous running

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Only just noticed these articles at Toms Hardware; made me think of @Bangers thread last month in search of cheap drives.

Fraudulent hard drive scandal deepens at Seagate: Clues point at Chinese Chia mining farms

Seagate's fraudulent HDD scandal expands: IronWolf Pro hard drives reportedly also affected

Pretty appalling the lengths fraudsters will go to! But at least there is another series of metrics on these drives they haven’t been able to erase.

There are several checks on the Seagate drives, the QR code is not only printed on the label but stamped into the top cover of the drive and when scanned it takes you to a page that confirms the serial number which can also be seen via the so far tamper proof metrics you mention and the power on hours test.

Both my cheap ebay drives check out. WD Reds are a different story.

Edited by Banger (Thu 17-Apr-25 12:12:44)