German outlet Heise.de says it may have uncovered fraud after hearing from many of its readers who bought supposedly new Seagate hard drives, which turned out to be very much used.
Last week, the publication relayed the experience of one of Heise.de’s readers, who said he had bought a couple of 14TB Seagate Exos HDDs that seemed a little strange. The drives had some minor signs of wear on the outside, but after a quick look at the SMART stats, everything appeared normal. Later, though, the reader did a more thorough Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) test and discovered that one drive had already been used for 10,000 hours, and the other 15,000 hours.
Naturally, he returned the drives to the store he bought them from, an official Seagate retailer, and decided to replace them with two 16TB Exos HDDs purchased from a different store. These drives also turned out to be heavily used: 22,000 hours logged on each one.
Although both HDD sellers, neither of which Heise.de identified, claimed the Exos drives were simply brand-new retail models, Seagate told the publication that all four drives were actually OEM models. This meant that the normal five-year warranty did not apply like it would to typical drives bought at retail.
The initial retailer eventually stopped selling the 14TB and 16TB HDDs at some point and even canceled an order that Heise.de had anonymously placed. According to the report, Seagate is looking into how this happened, especially as one of the retailers has the storage corporation’s endorsement as an official retailer.
After this report was published, the floodgates opened, and over fifty other Heise.de readers said they experienced the exact same thing after buying apparently new Seagate HDDs. While 50 is a small sample size, the issue might be widespread since they bought their drives at a dozen different retailers, some of which are on Seagate’s official “where-to-buy” list. Some of the impacted retailers are quite large, such as Amazon and Mindfactory.
Most readers report having 16TB Exos drives, but others have the 12TB model, and a few have non-Exos HDDs ranging from 4 to 18TB. The time used ranges from 15,000 to 36,000 hours except for two 4TB HDDs, which were both used for about 50,000 hours. Heise.de checked a few drives at random to see when their warranties expired, and most of them were for 2026. Assuming a five-year warranty, that means they were first made and sold in 2021. All of the readers who reported receiving a used Seagate drive had bought it in the past few weeks, meaning the issue is relatively recent.
It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new. Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.
We reached out to Seagate for comment but haven’t received a reply yet.
Seagate does have a direct relationship with used hard drives. Nearly a year ago, the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. It also has a Hard Drive Circularity Program to find as many refurbish-worthy drives as possible, including Exos models. However, this store only sells in the US, so it doesn’t seem likely that it has anything to do with the current situation.
