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Interesting. Just before I left Google they were looking to resell "old" drives from their machines. Basically after 3 years they had been depreciated, so the drives would be securely erased and sent to a reseller who would sell them (presumably marked as used) for a good price. However, those drives would have 20,000 - 30,000 hours on them not 4,000 - 6,000. When we decommissioned a bunch of Blekko servers the guys buying them were mostly interested in the drives (easy to resell) but again they had a lot of hours on them. Warranty replacements we had done over the years had a special label that said they were refurbs.

All of that to say I'm wondering who runs a drive for 250 days and then sells it. I could easily see a thousand hours being run as burn in to catch infant mortality failures but those are pretty much all gone after the first thousand hours.

At the few datacenters I worked at the drives were being crushed and put into bins for recycling. Burn in would only take a day or so. A thousand hours is a bit too long for a burn in cycle.

Unlikely, but the reseller gets new drives, uses them (selling cloud storage) while they sit as unsold inventory, then sells them as new.

Disclaimer: I work for WD/HGST in Enterprise Support.

Another problem we see a lot with 'refurb' purchases (especially SAS models) is that the drives can be OEM types made to order for use in a vendor's SAN/NAS enclosure; the OEMs often load up their own firmware and tweak the hardware design, so generic code may be incompatible and can't be installed. Buyers try these drives with their own hardware and when they don't work (at all or partially) they come to us for a firmware 'fix'.

Warranty and support issues for OEM drives are handled by the company for whom the drives are made, and they may not cover second-hand drives purchased through certain channels. A customer the other day had around $8K of 'refurb' drives that wouldn't work in their storage enclosure and we had to refer them back to their auction-site based supplier.

Amazon has become quite the cesspool of late. Everyone and their dog can register as a reseller there. And as long as the stink do not reach Amazon spreadsheets, nothing happens about it.

> Amazon has become quite the cesspool of late.

Agreed, Fulfillment by Amazon opened the floodgates for dishonest sellers and reviewers. It's slowly turning into Alibaba.

I no longer trust anything I see on Amazon unless it's a well-known, name brand product being sold by Amazon themselves.

Even then, how do you know that it didn't come off a rejects pallet originally shipped overseas b/c the items were deemed "not fit" for sale in the US, then reshipped back in bulk to a private reseller?

Saddest part of this trend is it's not just Amazon. Newegg, BestBuy, and even Walmart, now have these "marketplaces" full of spurious sellers. Drop-shipped rejects, so-called refurbs and mis-represented descriptions abound.

edit: sorry if not from US, I and my experiences are from the US and tend to be US-centric.

Is there evidence of NewEgg doing this? Ive seen proof of the others, but not NewEgg? I hope its not true, Ive always had good experience with them for probably close to a decade now.

Newegg doesn't do this, but Newegg does allow third party sellers on their website so the third party sellers still may be selling garbage.

Newegg really needs to drop that shit, it's bad for business.

Agreed. It has sullied their otherwise stellar track record, IMO.

On another note: THANK YOU NEWEGG! For adding an apply to their side-bar search function so my page doesn't have to refresh EVERY! TIME! I! MAKE! A! SELECTION!

Even "sold by Amazon themselves" is something of a concern:

There's no differentiation in the warehouse between "item as sold by Amazon" and "item as sold by Joe's Hard Drives and Fulfilled By Amazon".

People have commented on this before, with returns and exchanges, unique identifiers on something that they bought back from themselves (can't remember the reasoning) not being present, and Amazon saying "well, all items with a given SKU get grouped together".

Same with laptop batteries: sell as a 5200mAh battery, label it as 5200mAh, but when you read the chip that's inside (similar to reading SMART) it's actually 4400mAh or something.

Some more info I wrote a while ago: http://lucb1e.com/rp/batstat/en/

Never ever buy 3rd party from Amazon.

Maybe if they have tens of thousands of perfect ratings and it is fulfilled by Amazon, worth the risk for non-mechanical stuff.

But even then, there is tons of counterfeit stuff on Amazon and eBay now - if it is a brand name and the price is too good, it is fake. Even if the price is okay it still might be fake.

China is getting amazing at making fakes. Even medication for humans and pets.

This is disturbing.

What happens once they are able to wipe SMART data? Is that even possible?

I can't remember the specific forum off the top of my head. But I remember reading several long threads covering complaints about one or two specific hard drive resellers. Apparently not only were new hard drives not actually new, but the SMART data looked suspicious. So I think that SMART data may not actually be completely trustworthy.

Edit: Here's the thread: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/goharddriv... That forum also has some in depth reviews of white label hard drives.

Not just hard-drives, but a lot of electronics. Smartphones are a huge issue as well. There are sellers, selling counterfeit androids phones or refurbed phones as new. It's very disturbing.

Hey, have you thought about writing a blog/medium/github piece about how the "average" person can check this for themselves?

have you seen similar issues with brand new drives bought from legit VARs? i.e. the big new HSGT drives.

we've had good luck but something about your username tells me you buy more than we do...

the worst luck we've had is the large 2.5" drives. those are basically just disposable.

No, the only issues we have seen is buying "new" drives on amazon that aren't the very latest, greatest 6-8TB drives.

If they are very new, they haven't had time to percolate through the supply chain and come out the other end as "drives we can pretend are new".

So again, as of May 2016, it is 4TB drives that we are seeing at great prices, sold as brand new (no confusion about this at all) on Amazon, and ... turns out they are not new.

I keep meaning to write a blog post about this with specific vendor names ...