A scorching potato: A widespread scandal involving used Seagate arduous drives fraudulently bought as new has continued to escalate, with new proof suggesting that the drives originated from Chinese language cryptocurrency mining farms. The drives, a lot of which had logged 15,000 to 50,000 hours of prior use, had been reportedly altered to look unused earlier than re-entering the retail provide chain.
The primary reviews of affected drives surfaced in January, when shoppers seen inconsistencies in supposedly new Seagate Exos disk drives utilized in knowledge facilities. The problem has since expanded globally, with over 200 confirmed instances throughout Europe, Australia, Thailand, and Japan. Whereas Seagate maintains that these merchandise didn’t come from its official distribution channels, the scandal raises critical issues about unauthorized resellers and provide chain safety.
An investigation by Heise means that the fraudulent HDDs had been sourced from mining operations in China to mine Chia, a cryptocurrency that triggered a surge in HDD demand earlier than changing into economically unviable.
In the course of the Chia mining growth, demand for high-capacity arduous drives skyrocketed, resulting in shortages and value surges. Nonetheless, because the profitability of Chia mining declined, many operations shut down, flooding the market with used {hardware}. It now seems that a few of these used drives had been relabeled and resold as new, deceiving each retailers and shoppers.
Though customary SMART parameters monitor HDD utilization, these values had been reset to obscure the precise put on and tear. Nonetheless, a extra in-depth test utilizing FARM (Area-Accessible Reliability Metrics) values can reveal a drive’s true operational historical past. Customers involved about their purchases can confirm their drives utilizing Smartmontools model 7.4+ (use command: smartctl -l farm /dev/sda) or Seagate’s SeaTools software program.
Retailers impacted by the scandal have taken completely different approaches to deal with buyer complaints. Some have acknowledged that they unknowingly bought these manipulated drives and are providing refunds or exchanges.
Others have arrange devoted customer support portals to deal with the problem, whereas a number of insist on verifying the affected drives earlier than offering compensation. Many retailers stress that they bought these HDDs from suppliers they trusted, and so they had been unaware of any tampering earlier than promoting them to shoppers. The Heise investigation cites a number of German retailers (Alternate.de, Wortmann, Proshop, Kosatec, Galaxus, amongst others), nonetheless they’ve additionally tracked comparable used drives being bought in different European nations and areas.
Seagate has distanced itself from the fraudulent gross sales, saying that it didn’t distribute the affected drives. It urges affected consumers to report their instances by way of fraud@seagate.com. The corporate has launched an inside investigation and is collaborating with retailers and legislation enforcement to trace the fraudulent resellers.
