How to verify Seagate hard drives running hours after used-sold-as-new

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How to verify Seagate hard drives running hours after used-sold-as-new scandal

A report from the German technology company Heise suggests that some Seagate customers have purchased new hard drives that were used for tens of thousands of hours already.

The details:

At least fifty Heise readers have reportedly purchased used Seagate hard drives instead of new hard drives in the past couple of weeks.
Drives were bought at different retailers, some of which official Seagate partners.
Seagate Exos hard drives appear affected the most.
Some drives appear to have been in use for at least three years and with tens of thousand of running hours…

* Wouldn’t CrystalDiskInfo detect the drives as used ?

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Alex5723 wrote:

Wouldn’t CrystalDiskInfo detect the drives as used ?

Most likely not. The article says that

Heise reports that the checking of SMART values won’t reveal the used nature of the drives. Users need to look at Seagate’s FARM values instead. FARM stands for Field Accessible Reliability Metrics.

If CrystalDiskInfo does not check these FARM values then users won’t see anything out of the ordinary even though the drives are “used”.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Alex5723, Cybertooth

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https://nascompares.com/answer/how-to-check-if-your-hard-drive-is-new-or-used-full-guide-for-windows-mac-linux-seagate-hdd-fraud-check/

4 users thanked author for this post.

TechTango, SueW, Sueska, Cybertooth

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That article is no good for Windows users.
Your original post indicated you could only check via the FARM value and the nascompares article doesn’t show how to do that in Windows or Mac – Linux only.

Ghacks has a page with details of running the FARM query in Windows (smartmontools only).

To do the same thing in Mac you need to run the command sudo smartctl -l farm /dev/sdb
Where /dev/sdb is the device you identified in step 3 of the Mac instructions.

cheers, Paul

2 users thanked author for this post.

windbg, Alex5723

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