Purchased an Intel S3520 datacenter SSD off ebay, and the SMART data comes in super clean. Like 28 hours powered on & everything else shiny too.
I looked up the warranty and working backwards suggests this unit was manufactured in 2017.
So either I got impossibly lucky with a cold spare or somehow this got reset. Are fraudulently reset data-center SSDs a thing? Google suggests it’s a thing on consumer drives but less clear on intel DC ones.
Also…first post here!
I don’t see why they can’t be flashed like any other SSD. I use mostly used/refurbished drives from difference sources and they all tend to have really low hours. I am assuming they are mostly cold spares.
Most enterprise equipment is sold with a support contract. A drive fails in your 2 year old HPE server, and a tech is dispatched to replace it within a few hours, and it will be the same model of device. This requires having caches of spare parts all over the service area. Once servers fall out of service contracts, they can sell off the spare parts.
Depending on the part and level of service contract, they can also fly out the parts. Low failures items like blackplanes will be stocked in a warehouse near a major airport for quick loading on the next flight.
Well that’s what is slightly disconcerting - cold spares must be <10% of the drives out there maybe?
Think I’ll try some destructive write testing today…that should at least spot bad sectors
I’m going to run these in a mirror so not end of world if it isn’t actually new as long as it’s just old not broken
edit: Full destructive write test comes back clean so regardless of reset or not it seems like a viable drive
