- Seagate denies involvement in false HDD vibrations.
- Buyers can check Seagate HDD use history using relevant tools.
- Retailers offer a kind of compensation.
Seagate hard drives previously used in Chinese Chia Cryptocurrency Mining Farms have been resold as new by unsuspecting retailers.
A study by Heise indicates that large quantities of high mileage drives have emerged on the market, especially in Europe, Australia, Thailand and Japan.
These drives, often data center-class Seagate Exos models, are found with thousands of operational hours despite being marketed as brand new.
Chia Farms and the flood of used drives
At the top of the cryptocurrency boom, mining required huge storage capacity, led to an increase in demand for advanced HDDs. However, as the profitability of Chia mining dropped, many farms shut down and sold their hardware. These hard drives were then packed again and reintroduced on the market and deceive customers.
Concerned buyers can verify the true utility history of their Seagate HDDs using special diagnostic tools. While smart parameters can be reset to hide prior use, the farm (Field Available Reliability Metrics) values values a more accurate record.
Users can control these values by running the Smartctl -l Farm /Dev /SDA command in SmartMontOol’s version 7.4 or higher or using Seagate’s own Seatools software to inspect the operating history of the drive.
Seagate has stated that it only distributes real hard drives through the official channel, and it suspects that these used HDDs entered the secondary market before reaching consumers.
Nevertheless, it has also launched a full -scale study and has called on affected buyers to report any suspicious purchases to [email protected].
Affected retailers Firefights The problem, where Galaxus creates online help pages for affected customers, while Proshop offers free returns and replacements. Alternate, a German retailer, denies prior knowledge of the problem, but has called on customers to report used drives. Wortmann, on the other hand, insists on verifying HDDs before offering compensation.
Via Tomshardware
