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.
