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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Full of scams.

Used section is filled with "refurbished" 0 hours SMART drives. Those are >40K hours drives with wiped SMART. Sometimes people doing the wiping are sloppy and you can dig into previous smart logs. Example:

    SMART Extended Self-test Log Version: 1 (1 sectors)
    Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
    # 1  Extended offline    Aborted by host               90%     11829         -
    # 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5586         -
    # 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     41650         -
    # 4  Vendor (0xb0)       Completed without error       00%     41252         -
    # 5  Vendor (0x71)       Completed without error       00%     41251         -

I bought this one "0 hours refurbished", ran Short offline after a year with 5K and another (clicked by accident so quickly aborted) a week ago with 11K. 52K hours total.

New section is full of "new" MaxDigitalData refurbs. Same drives as in Used section, but with new sticker and wiped SMART. :)

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This is really an Amazon problem right? It's not the fault of the site. The guy who runs it does claim to attempt to filter out scams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32629542

But that seems like a nearly impossible endless job.

I dont see any attempts. Plenty of Hitachi drives listed in NEW section. Hitachi doesnt exist for a long time now, and last drives with that branding came out in 2018.

I dont know if I would blame Amazon in this particular case. You need to know what "refurbished" drive being sold with empty SMART actually is. Some sellers will disclose those as wiped, tested and certified (by the seller), others will try to sell as brand new old stock.

Products that are sold after the year they have been manufactured are not scams.

Nobody sells 4 year old 'old new stock' drives in bulk. Just to make a point first Hitachi from the list:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E939BFY?tag=synack-20&linkCode=...

"2M hours MTBF rating & 5-year limited warranty"

Product Warranty: For warranty information about this product, please click https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71+GyVRorWS.pdf [PDF ]

"This Limited Warranty applies to new HGST HDDs purchased from an authorized HGST dealer by the original purchaser for normal use and not for resale."

"To determine the warranty period for your specific Product, please visit www.hgst.com."

hgst.com? sure looks like legit 5 year warranty for this new drive! What do the customers say?

> Do not buy from Quiet Day Shopping - USED drives Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2021 Verified Purchase Purchased 2x OEM Bare drives, sold as new. Received 2x beat up drives used for > 2khrs according to SMART logs on the drives. Lots of wonderful SMART errors on the drives as well. Had to pay $15 to ship them back. Very damn annoyed. Do not buy from "Quiet Day Shopping", you will not receive new OEM bare drives, but will instead receive used and abused garbage. Really, don't purchase drives from this page. You're unlikely to receive what you want.

For those that need a reliable drive, ignore every drive listed that doesn't have a 5 year warranty and that pretty much filters out all the scams.

edit: and filter for new and use your normal Amazon smarts to not buy if there are few reviews or from a seller that has poor ratings. It would be helpful if diskprices.com showed the number of reviews and average review for the drive as well as who it is sold by and what their review count and average review is. Also a filter for shipped/sold by Amazon (I'm aware of commingling of inventory). And a filter for the number of warranty years.

Also good idea to run a tool like f3 (fight flash fraud) before putting anything on the disk.

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