Hard disk fraud: Increasing evidence of origin in China
Almost 200 readers have now noticed long runtimes on their new Seagate hard disks. Reports from abroad are also increasing.
(Image: Seagate)
- Lutz Labs
Recently, many online retailers have sent out Seagate hard disks as new that have already been running somewhere for many, many hours. As yet unknown fraudsters had reset the SMART values of used drives and smuggled them back into distribution via equally unknown channels. Official Seagate dealers are also affected.
However, Seagate server hard disks also log their runtimes and other parameters elsewhere: The so-called FARM values cannot (yet?) be reset by the fraudsters (FARM stands for Field Accessible Reliability Metrics). These can also be read out with the smartmontools or the Seagate Seatools. According to the readers, the affected drives have been in operation for an average of around 25,000 hours.
Cases from all over the world
However, not only German customers are affected. We have received reports from Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, the UK, the Czech Republic and the USA. The online retailer East Digital from Hong Kong is also said to be sending out such drives. They have now sold out of the drives, but apparently they often have such “special offers” in their program. We have also seen forum entries from Australian East Digital customers who are now also experiencing long FARM runtimes.
We have also received reports from Japan that the case is being reported there. We are happy to receive further information by e-mail –. If you prefer to remain anonymous, you can do so via our anonymous mailbox.
Slabs from chia farms?
Where the slabs came from and how they got to Germany is still unclear. However, many such used drives are said to be on sale in China at the moment. These could come from former computing farms for the cryptocurrency Chia, which are now being shut down as farming such coins is no longer profitable: The energy costs are now higher than the expected profit.
The available storage space in this network was initially only a few exabytes, but later rose sharply. Since the summer of 2024, the storage space in the Chia network has been decreasing, from around 34 exabytes at the time to around 19 exabytes now. The loss of around 15 exabytes corresponds to around one million hard disks with a gross capacity of 16 TByte. Not all of these will come from Seagate; however, the manufacturer currently has a share of more than 40 percent of the hard disk market. Roughly speaking, more than 400,000 used Seagate drives with 16 TByte could have been discarded from the Chia farms.
The message from an affected person in a forum fits in with this. When asked, Seagate stated that his hard disk was originally sold to a Chinese company from Mongolia. Seagate's German representative is not so forthcoming about the origin of the drives, citing data protection and assuring that the company is not involved in the scam.
Warranty far too short
Some of the disks still have a few months of warranty left, but most of them have long since expired. Many were sold as part of a larger system – and therefore as so-called OEM disks, for which the manufacturer provides no warranty. If they were sold in a Dell system, for example, then Dell is responsible for the warranty processing in this system, it is effectively no longer a Seagate disk.
Many of our readers have complained, even long before these cases of fraud, about the practice of dealers selling OEM disks without a manufacturer's warranty. We therefore recommend that you visit the warranty inquiries of the dealers immediately after receiving a drive and check the status (Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital). The serial number is sometimes already noted on the invoice and can otherwise be read through the anti-static packaging before it is opened; this also allows the production date to be identified. If this is several years in the past, caution is advised and a return is at least worth considering.
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