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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s down to incompetent returns handling.

People buy a 500GB SSD and a 2TB SSD at the same time and return the 500GB one in the 2TB box. No one checks the return properly and it goes back to the warehouse and is sent out again.

I expect this doesn’t happen enough to affect margins enough to invest in doing something about it so it carries on.

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The fraud can get pretty sophisticated. I came across a WD external hard drive that visually looked fine. Only when I plugged it in did I notice the size difference, and upon inspecting the SMART tables saw it was a much older Seagate brand drive with bad sectors. Somehow they had managed to swap the drive without making any marks on the case to indicate it had been disassembled. Either that or there's someone selling empty unassembled shells in new condition.

For a while (maybe still now?) it was cheaper to buy external HDDs and 'shuck' them than to buy the standalone drive. Some people took the obvious decision to get a free upgrade by replacing the internal drive and returning.

WD externals were extremely popular a few years ago because they contained standard WD Reds at $20 under normal market rate. Really easy to shuck the case and slap it in your NAS. I bought about a dozen myself. Of course the people who did what burned you ruined it for the rest of us, and now they build the externals with custom pinouts on the drives.

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