I bought a "New" 2TB HGST Drive on Amazon

Hardware Hub Storage
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A couple of days ago I was reading this thread and amongst the discussion I found a new HGST 2TB hard drive for a pretty decent price so I decided to buy it as my 1TB drive was almost full.

However, a little while after I bought it I read some of the reviews and a few were complaining about the drives not being new and had 16000 - 25000+ hours of power on time and that the seller was falsifying the SMART data to show them as new drives.

So today my drive arrived and at this point I was 100% sure that it was not a new drive and commenced with my testing.

I first opened Gnome Disk Utility and viewed the SMART Data:

Screenshot from 2017-01-21 16-15-50.png998x572 57.1 KB

From here everything seems fine, it has 0 bad sectors, power cycles count is 1 and the power on time is zero. But this is not conclusive evidence that this drive is new as this data can be falsified.

I then ran sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb and these were the results:

martctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.8.6-300.fc25.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short captive       Completed without error       00%     32385         -
# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     31978         -
# 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     15579         -
# 4  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     12782         -
# 5  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     12369         -

As you can see the last test ran on this drive was with a power on time of 32385 hours which is 3.6 years, this means that the drive is at least 3.6 years old. Also the date listed on the drive is MAY-2012 so the drive its self is five years old and likely won't be under manufactures warranty, especially given that the power on is over three years which is more than the warranty from HGST.

20170121_161405_HDR.jpg3840x2160 1.47 MB

I am also running testdisk to see if I can find anything on the drive but it hasn't turned up with anything as of yet.

All of this isn't such as big issue for me as I noticed early on that this drive was a little bit dodgy and it is still within the return period from Amazon, but others have not been so lucky, from reading the reviews (from multiple sellers) these drives are likely to last around 6 months at most which is past the return period from Amazon and the drive isn't covered under warranty from HGST either, and not to mention massive data loss for people who don't have regular backups.

The drive I got was sold by C-PAY on Amazon but many different sellers are doing the same thing as can be seen by the reviews for this drive:

18 Likes
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Nice scam alert, you're doing god's work. Sorry if I drove you to buy into it.

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I have up to the 22nd of February to return it so all is good, just don't want anyone to make the same mistake who doesn't know enough to check these things. Going to post most of the stuff above in the review of the drive as well.

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HGST are good drives. Shame that sellers are possibly giving them a bad name. You might want to send an email to hgst. They may be able to get amazon to take action.

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My bet is that HGST already know but the problem is systemic with a large number of sellers doing it and would be hard to stop them all. From reading the reviews people have emailed HGST about the warranty on these drives for which there is none and they indicated that the drives should be returned to the seller.

But I guess it is worth a try, could also hit them up on Twitter as well.

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I mean, amazon banned out-of-spec usb 3 cables because of a few obsessive reviewers, so maybe we can get shit done too.

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Thanks for sharing the info!
There is a reason I do not shop "mission critical" hardware on Amazon.

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That's why I only buy from "amazon" unless I've done research on the seller.

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Amazon Germany just forwards you to Amazon US and not-Us citizen, you are done righ there.
I stick to Saturn/Mediamarkt/Conrad/Reichelt as they have their HQ on German ground. Should they ever do really wrong, I could pay them a visit within 10 hours.

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The company that sold the drive is based in Germany, anyway Amazon have already processed my return, they'll send a carrier to collect it on Monday and i'll get my money back when they receive it.

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Oh I didn't notice this was EU. Merican ignorance to assume everyone on here is from the states. Sorry mate.

1 Like
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Hmm... I just bought a 3TB HGST from Amazon a month ago and haven't installed it, yet. Good to know; I'll have to check that. Thank you for posting, as I was unaware it was an issue.

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Let's start sending angry letters to amazon support... anyone want to set up a form-fillable splashpage?

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Should definitely contact HGST en masse. Amazon won't care.

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like I said, they got rid of out of spec USB 3 cables from a similar campaign, and if nothing else it'll add "refurb" or "used" to the listing titles:

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Amazon seller

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No problem. We are all here to learn.

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If we get enough people to come forward we'd get a better idea of which sellers are dirty and how many there are. We could come up with some sort of blacklist or something.

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great Idea. I bought a new old stock hitachi and I'm checking it right now

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Then the @moderators could pin it on the main page.