Trust and Transparency in the Hard Drive Market: Our Commitment to Authentic Products

A recent article from Seagate has discussed a concerning situation regarding used Seagate drives being sold as new in Europe. The drives had their SMART data wiped, and sellers offered them as new to unknowing customers. As of now, we don't know what part of the supply chain is to blame for the drives being wiped, but that is neither here nor there. As a drive reseller that has a significant inventory of Seagate, we felt the need to discuss this issue, and how it affects us. Let's talk about the issues and how we're going to make sure it won't affect the drives we sell:

The Challenge in the Market

Seagate's article identifies four categories in the second-hand market:

1. Gray Market Drives: New drives sold outside their intended region or application

2. Pulled Drives: Used drives removed from systems and potentially misrepresented as new

3. Outright Fraud: Counterfeit products with fake labels or lower-quality drives marketed as premium models

4. Legitimate Second-Hand Products: Including properly recertified drives from Seagate.

According to Seagate, bad actors in the supply chain are acquiring used drives and falsely advertising them as new—a practice that undermines customer trust and product reliability.

Our Transparent Approach

Over the years, we've worked hard and invested thousands of not only dollars, but man hours into becoming a reputable seller of new, recertified, and refurbished storage. We take great pride in providing quality tested drives free of defects that you can depend on. We understand situations like this can make customers weary of anything on the second-hand market, so we wanted to give a bit of information into how we make sure you're getting exactly what you pay for.

Verified New Products

Our new drives come exclusively from verified sources with proper documentation. We maintain direct relationships with manufacturers and authorized distributors, creating a secure supply chain that eliminates opportunities for counterfeit products. 

Enhanced Verification Process

Even after doing our best due diligence, sometimes things can slip past us. To counter this, starting this month, we've implemented a check specifically for Seagate drives that can detect hidden power-on hours due to wiped SMART data.

This is possible due to something Seagate calls FARM logs. To put it simply, this is like verifying the miles on your car. If your odometer says 10 miles, but you pull the data from the computer and see it has 5000 engine hours, something is clearly wrong. So even if the SMART data has been wiped on a Seagate drive, we can pull the real hours from the FARM logs and verify the drive really does have zero hours. 

The process is simple: we will spot check new drives by pulling the FARM data off the drives to verify they are in fact new and not used drives with wiped SMART data. Doing this with every drive would be somewhat cost prohibitive since we would have to open every single drive…defeating the purpose of factory sealed drives, but testing a few drives from a batch and selling those as open box seems to be the best middle ground of verifying within a degree of certainty you're getting a legit drive, and opening every new drive we sell.

Manufacturer-Recertified Drives

When it comes to manufacturer recertified drives, they come directly from Seagate's own recertification program—a source that Seagate itself confirms as safe and legitimate. These drives feature the clear "recertified" labeling as described in Seagate's article and will report 0 hours across the board. Once we test these they will have some power on hours, but other than that these are clean slates from Seagate.

Honest Refurbished Products

For our refurbished drives, we maintain complete transparency by:

• Never wiping SMART data: The complete operation history remains intact and easy to view yourself

• Full disclosure: We clearly communicate the health status and power-on hours of every refurbished drive on their listings

• Consistent verification: Each of the thousands of refurbished drives we've sold maintains its original SMART data so you know exactly what you're getting

Why This Matters

The integrity of storage devices isn't just about getting value for money—it's about protecting your data. A misrepresented drive with an unknown history might fail prematurely, potentially resulting in down time, or even data loss. 

By maintaining these standards, it means you get what you paid for, and we know for sure that every drive we sell is legit. 

Verify for Yourself

For customers who want to verify their drives personally, we recommend using Smartmontools to check the FARM data yourself. This open-source utility can reveal the true history of your drive, including power-on hours and other crucial health metrics that would expose any tampering.

smartctl -l farm /dev/(drive)

Thank you ghacks for making a great writeup on this

Moving Forward

We're committed to continuing to stay ahead of problems like this, and only source from trusted suppliers.

Additionally, our recertified drives come from Seagate, and according to Seagate themselves, are currently the safest option when it comes to non-new storage. If you want more information from Seagate themselves, we would highly recommend you read the article yourselves about the situation.