Scammers selling old hard drives as new ones with 12-16 terabytes

Scammers are erasing Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) data, repackaging used hard drives, and selling them as new for use in servers or network-attached storage (NAS), Heise.de reports.

Many legitimate retailers in Germany are sending users used Seagate hard drives that have accumulated significant hours despite marketing them as new. Most of them have up to 16 terabytes of storage space. However, some are smaller. Recently, the scam has expanded to also include HDDs from the Ironwolf Pro series.

German publication Heise.de received more than 200 anonymous complaints from readers who bought HDDs from Amazon, JB Computer, Mindfactory, and other retailers. The drives display updated production dates and plausible warranty periods of five years until 2029. Their SMART values are fresh, suggesting they weren’t used before. Fraudsters are even reusing valid serial numbers.

However, the hidden FARM (Field Accessible Reliability Metrics) data reveals thousands of operating hours and true manufacturing dates. Many drives have been used for 15,000-36,000 hours, while some were spinning for as long as 50,000 hours.

Sometimes, there are other obvious signs of use, such as dents, scratches on SATA connectors, and misaligned labels.

“We now receive more emails with information about potentially fake values for NAS drives from the Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro series with 8 and 16 TByte storage space,” Heise.de warns.

Seagate confirmed to Heise.de that it’s aware of the issue, stating, “Fraud involving Ironwolf is not new – it’s part of broader deceptive practices. Seagate is investigating.”

Users in Germany are recommended to use Smartmontools or similar software to read the FARM values of Seagate hard drives and determine if they have been tampered with.

Many complaints about similar scams can be found on Reddit.

“From the second I unboxed the drive, I was suspicious. The packaging was not the same as all the previous IronWolfs I’d received. The drive was very clearly used and was not clean. There were fingerprints all over it and clear markings on the mounting points. The SATA ports had clearly been plugged in before,” one user, who bought a 10TB drive from Amazon, posted.

Other users also reported receiving drivers with less storage space than advertised on the platform.

Users shopping on large marketplaces should check the seller and avoid it if it's an unknown or untrustworthy third party. Cybernews previously reported on frustrated German gamers who were scammed by a fraudulent seller offering too-good-to-be-true Xbox deals.