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Seagate hard drive controversy persists as scammers discover methods to alter reliability metrics
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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It wasn't them as a company right? it was a few resellers that decided to buy a shady lot of drives for resale. As in not buy from Sagate, but buy from somebody saying hey I got a ton of drives for cheap you can unload
If Ford is the only company with an odometer rollback problem, blame Ford, not the used car dealers.
Well if Is seagate reacts by locking down firmware, and deleting the resellers that knew they were getting non factory shipped equipment then this is fine. Part of the issue is the scale was so large some resellers didn't know, because they purchase from another larger stock company and rightly assume everything is factory original when ordering.
The fault is the manufacturer selling tamper-friendly products.
There are always going to be shady resellers but there is no reason a manufacturer should allow them to reset the counter for power on hours.
The issue is exploits exist in every hardware and software, just takes a person looking for vulners
I commented before reading, as is tradition. I expected these tools to be hard to temper with though, do the other manufacturers have the same "vulnerability" ?
Not sure, someone went to great lengths to pull off a large scam. A smaller scale one was an amazon purchased Xbox drive that did the bait and switch. They put a newer controller board on an ancient drive, wiped SMART in some way, and put it into the Xbox drive caddy with a Void if remove sticker across the seam. Curious at some point, I opened the caddy, to find what I thought was a new drive, was on old board but with an ancient drive covered in dirt and oil all over it. Like they didn't bother to wipe the grime off since it was covered in the plastic caddy. Scammers going to scam.