I had ordered 8 x 2TB HGST Ultrastar HDDs on Amazon for the storage server at the office, great price was on them for $55 each, or so I thought.
It was a 3rd party seller whose items were fulfilled by Amazon, and when the drives arrived they were in Uline anti-static bags and 7 of 8 had Lenovo stickers above the labels.
3 of 8 drives were DOA, and when I checked, HGST has no warranty for these when I entered their S/N. Which these were sold as new, apparently these were OEM style. Which to my understanding isn’t covered by manufacture warranty anyway. Though the product page claims 5-year warranty, then the seller claimed 2-year warranty.
Upon further investigation I decided to check the S.M.A.R.T. data with both CrystalDiskInfo on Windows 10 and “smartctl -a /dev/sd[drive letter here]” on linux. Which the drives had varying hours, from 18 to 70+ each.
Though the eye catcher was the fact the serial numbers don’t match at all between what the label has and what S.M.A.R.T. displays.
Product Page:
I checked on a Western Digital 1TB I had around here in the office that came in a Dell computer, and I know the S/N patches perfectly. My retail HGST drives are at home in my storage server there so I can’t check to see if their S/N matches or not but I intend to check.
Though I find this odd regardless. Shouldn’t the S/N match?
I’d exercise Amazon’s return policy to its fullest.
I’ve received drives from them sold as “new” that were clearly open-box/bag. I returned them without ever plugging them in. I’ve also purchased dozens of other drives from Amazon without issue.
This seems to be pretty common with the cheap Hitachis. Sometimes you get good drives, sometimes you get drives that were obviously pulled from service from some server somewhere.
Sounds like the seller was trying to pass the latter as the former. I’d return all of the drives if possible and buy from a different seller.
Yeah, after discussion with the customer service they are taking this matter very seriously.
Thank you, I definitely wanted confirmation regarding the serial numbers.
Yeah, my home server I had bought all brand new retail drives for it, and I don’t have any complaints with those.
This was in hopes of having something more affordable for the business, while keeping two spare drives on hand. That didn’t turn out the way I wanted. lol
The way I view it is that stuff is usually cheap for a reason. Not saying that cheap is bad, I really like cheap stuff, but if it seems too good to be true it probably is.
