Why Does My 'New' Drive Have Hours on It?
A NEW drive from us can show 0 to 2 power-on hours. That time comes from our verification test, not from someone else's server.
You buy a new drive from us and see it has a couple hours of power-on hours. Suddenly you're worried you just paid a premium for someone else's used hardware. Don’t worry, you didn’t. It happens because we actually power the drives on before they ship. A NEW drive from ServerPartDeals can show anywhere from zero to two power-on hours and that time comes directly from verification, not production use.
SMART doesn't care if a drive is sitting in a high-availability array or resting on a test bench for ten minutes; it counts every hour the platters are spinning. A small non-zero number on a NEW drive isn't always a red flag.
The Difference Between New and Verified
A factory-sealed drive might read zero, but open-box drives get tested. In this context, "NEW" means the drive has never been deployed in a production environment. It doesn't mean that it's never seen any electricity.
When we verify a NEW drive that isn't sealed, we plug it in to confirm the model, serial number, and firmware. We read the SMART data and ensure the drive actually works with all zeros across any self-reporting data. These drives don't undergo the multi-day torture tests reserved for used stock, which is why you also won't always find a full report on our Drive Health Lookup page for these units. Online the basic SMART scan we do will show instead of the full surface scan data we provide with used spinning disks.
We stick to a strict two-hour rule. If a drive is showing zeros at two hours or less, it stays NEW. The second it hits more than two hours, it's demoted and we don't round down or reset counters to keep a drive in a higher price bracket.
There has been some confusion online, so I want to stress once more that we at ServerPartDeals do not and never have wiped SMART data on a drive. The manufacturers themselves wipe SMART on a full OEM recertification, but we do not. Wiping that data removes the exact indicators that we have studied and built our brand around so removing it would only make our jobs harder.
Why Some Grades Have Hundreds of Hours
If you're buying MR or BULK drives, you're going to see much higher numbers. These drives go through an entirely different process than our NEW stock does and for good reason.
While NEW drives get functional verification, MR and BULK drives get a full surface scan of every single sector for integrity verification. This is time-consuming work, with the average scan times at roughly 1.5 hours per terabyte, meaning a 24TB drive takes about 36 hours just for one pass. Once you add in secure wiping, throughput testing, and the occasional needed retest, those hours can stack up quickly. Our ceiling for these grades is 750 hours (roughly 31 total days of runtime).
This isn't all just for show: a full surface scan is the only way to catch problems before they start to affect your hardware. According to a large-scale drive study by Google researchers, drives that showed a scan error were 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than those without. By forcing a read of every Logical Block Address (LBA) upfront, we can trigger an early drive death before it ever leaves the warehouse.
How to Verify Your Hardware
Don't just trust a single counter. If you want to know what you're actually running, you need the right tools.
On Windows, CrystalDiskInfo shows Power On Hours in its SMART list. That covers the basics. For anything deeper, use smartmontools: it's the standard on Linux and macOS, and it also has a native Windows build (run it from an admin terminal; smartctl --scan lists your drives). Whatever OS you're on, get the newest release you can. Older versions misreport some values, and the copy in your distro's package manager may be well behind, so check that with smartctl --version.
What you run depends on the drive. For SATA, sudo smartctl -A /dev/sdX (or /dev/disk2 on a Mac) shows attribute 9, Power_On_Hours. SAS drives don't have that attribute table, so run smartctl -x and look for "Accumulated power on time." NVMe drives list Power On Hours in their self-reported health logs.
If you're running Seagate enterprise or NAS drives, you can go a step further. smartctl -l farm /dev/sdX pulls the FARM log, Seagate's own internal record of drive usage, so you can compare its hours against SMART. You'll need smartmontools 7.4 or newer. If the drive carries an OEM label like Dell or HPE, add -T permissive (7.5 or newer) so smartctl recognizes it. Barracudas and other brands don't support FARM.
FARM can be tampered with too though, so check the per-head hours as well if you really aren’t trusting your source. Some smartmontools versions show those in seconds instead of hours. If the number looks absurdly high, divide it by 3,600.
Beyond the hour count, watch for:
- SMART and FARM values that don't agree
- Hours that don't match the grade you paid for
- Wear on the connectors, or labels that look replaced or don't match the drive
- A warranty lookup by serial number that comes back as expired, or registered to a different region
- A power cycle count higher than a handful
- A production date that doesn’t make sense with the date you purchased
Our testing adds hours to every drive, and resetting the counter afterward would be dishonest, so we leave it as is. Selling thousands of drives at their honest grade is better for business than squeezing an extra $50 out of a few by lying about hours.
Those hours also don’t touch your coverage. Every NEW drive we sell ships with a new [3-year manufacturer/SPD] warranty. A warranty runs on time, not on spindle hours, so the few minutes a drive spent on our bench don’t take any use away from you. If you bought from us and the numbers on your drive don’t seem to add up, contact our support team and we’ll walk through it with you.
Sources
Labs, Lutz. "Even More Sophisticated: Seagate Hard Disks Sold with Manipulated FARM Values." heise online, Heise Medien, Mar. 2025, www.heise.de/-10308297.
Labs, Lutz. "Hard Disk Fraud: Increasing Evidence of Origin in China." heise online, Heise Medien, Feb. 2025, www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evidence-of-origin-in-China-10269059.html.
Pinheiro, Eduardo, et al. "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population." Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '07), USENIX Association, Feb. 2007, pp. 17-29, research.google/pubs/failure-trends-in-a-large-disk-drive-population/.
Server Part Deals. "Drive Health Lookup." serverpartdeals.com/pages/test-reports.
Server Part Deals. "New vs. Recertified Hard Drives: A Comprehensive Comparison." serverpartdeals.com/blogs/blog-posts/new-vs-recertified-hard-drives-a-comprehensive-comparison.
Server Part Deals. "Trust and Transparency in the Hard Drive Market: Our Commitment to Authentic Products." serverpartdeals.com/blogs/news/trust-and-transparency-in-the-hard-drive-market-our-commitment-to-authentic-products.