How to verify Seagate hard drives running hours after used-sold-as-new scandal

A report from the German technology company Heise suggests that some Seagate customers have purchased new hard drives that were used for tens of thousands of hours already.

The details: 

• At least fifty Heise readers have reportedly purchased used Seagate hard drives instead of new hard drives in the past couple of weeks.
• Drives were bought at different retailers, some of which official Seagate partners.
• Seagate Exos hard drives appear affected the most.
• Some drives appear to have been in use for at least three years and with tens of thousand of running hours.

The problem

Some readers who experienced the issue noticed signs of wear on the devices. A check of the drive's SMART values however returned nothing out of the ordinary according to reports. Usage was close enough to that of newly bought hard drives.

Heise reports that the checking of SMART values won't reveal the used nature of the drives. Users need to look at Seagate's FARM values instead. FARM stands for Field Accessible Reliability Metrics.

It is unclear how widespread the issue is and whether it is limited to Germany or other countries as well.

The following guide walks users through the steps of checking Seagate drive FARM values to determine the actual runtime of the hard drives.

Checking FARM values of Seagate drives

Only a few public tools are capable of looking up advanced drive metrics. One of the tools is Smartmontools. It is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Unix and BSD.

The latest version of the tool can be downloaded from Heise's download server. Note that you need at least version 7.4, which is the latest at the time of writing. It is a command line utility. The installation on Windows adds several command files, which Windows users may execute from the Start menu.

It is furthermore possible to run commands directly. Here are the required commands:

• smartctl --scan-open: the command returns the hard drives.
• smartctl -l farm DRIVE: the command can only be run on Seagate hard drives. It collects FARM data.

Check the value of Power on Hours in the log file that gets created.

The second program that you may use is Seagate's own SeaTools application. You can download the latest version from Seagate. Again, it only runs on Seagate hard drives, so take that into account.

Closing Words

If you have bought Seagate hard drives recently, especially of the Exos family, then you may want to run the check to make sure that you got a pristine drive and not a drive that has been used for years in the worst case.

Now it is your turn. Have you bought Seagate hard drives in the past or do you prefer other hard drive manufacturers? Feel free to leave a comment down below.

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