German retail, by the will of fate, found itself at the epicenter of a scandal with counterfeit Seagate Exos family hard drives, which were used and sold as new. As it turned out, Seagate IronWolf Pro family hard drives were also subjected to similar falsification.
Image source: Seagate Technology
Formally, both families of Seagate hard drives have a similar hardware base and are designed for long-term operation, it’s just that the IronWolf Pro models were originally oriented towards enterprise-level network storage systems, and not cloud solutions like Exos. Heise representatives took part in a new investigation, which showed that Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives, which had been illegally given a “second youth”, appeared in German retail and a number of other countries.
Their Smart history has been erased, the serial number and QR code have been replaced with fake ones. The latter should lead to the Seagate website page that verifies a specific hard drive, but instead the user is taken to the warranty section. Only reading the FARM parameters with special software allows us to understand that the hard drive has been used, since some examples have more than 50,000 hours of operation. However, some of them also have traces of physical use, such as mechanical damage in the area of the mounting holes, interface connectors and on the case.
So far, Toshiba or Western Digital hard drives have not been involved in such counterfeiting, which is most likely related to the activities of Chinese miners, but they also do not store FARM parameters like Seagate products, so it is more difficult to find evidence of previous use in this case. According to Seagate representatives, such fraud is not new, and the manufacturer is currently conducting its own investigation to identify the source of supplies of such counterfeit products.