I got Seagate Scammed

TrueNAS General
1

I purchased all my drives for both NAS devices on Newegg, since they had stock and the right model for me. (Seagate EXOS16TB) When I received the drives I checked SMART status and all the power on hours were legit. Today, I realized multi_report.sh must have been broken by the upgrade to 25.04 so I updated the script and reran it. Multi_report told me my FARM hours were way off from SMART hours. It turns out it is trivial for scammers to change the SMART hours but Seagate has an immutable value called FARM. Farm hours are real hours.

./testscam.sh
Serial    SMART    FARM
========================
REDACTED   3939   14784
REDACTED   2561   13828
REDACTED   3941   14973
REDACTED   3955   14496
REDACTED   3941   14963
REDACTED   3941   30401
REDACTED   3940   14973
REDACTED   3955   14987

I love the 30000+ hour drive. I filed a complaint with Newegg and asked for replacement or refund from the merchant. If that fails, I will charge these back if possible. Moral of the story, check your Seagate drives, especially new ones.

2 Likes
2

Did you also check one of these drives by manually running the SMART commands to be sure?

3

I wrote and ran this script, directly pulls the data for each drive.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Serial    SMART    FARM"
echo "========================"
for drive in sda sdb sdc sdd sde sdf sdg sdh
do
   serial=`sudo smartctl -x /dev/$drive | grep Serial | awk '{print $3}'`
   smarthours=`sudo smartctl -x /dev/$drive | grep "Power-on" | grep -v "Spindle" | awk '{print $4}'`
   farmhours=`sudo smartctl -l farm /dev/$drive | grep "Power on Hours" | grep -v "Spindle" | awk '{print $4}'`
   echo "$serial   $smarthours   $farmhours"
done

my second nas

Serial    SMART    FARM
========================
REDACTED   2804   14698
REDACTED   2804   9904
REDACTED   1938   13503
REDACTED   2804   14698
REDACTED   2804   14876
REDACTED   2804   15062
REDACTED   2804   14926
REDACTED   2804   15064
3 Likes
4

Unfortunately that protection is no longer secure

The fraudster have figured out how to reset this as well

5

Still possibly within 5-year warranty. The others are 11k hours older than expected, that is about 15 months. Burnt-in drives…
If you bought these for new or refurbished, you were scammed, of course. But it’s not too bad compared with other reports where drives were well worn; these drives hopefully still have years of working life ahead.

6

Glad the script helped. Newegg has a great return policy which is why I prefer to shop there.

7

True, but I bought these as brand new drives and I have already had one fail. If I would have bought these refurbished, no problem.

2 Likes
8

If you bought the drives as new, then you really didn’t need the FARM data…the 3K+ hours reported by SMART should be more than enough to realize the drives aren’t new.

9

The 3000 hours were mine. When I bought them I checked the SMART data and they all had 0 hours on them. I just found out about the farm data check last weekend.

2 Likes
10

Too bad they have a shady history of selling used stuff as new and abysmal packaging issues and blaming the customer when they receive damaged items.

Note OP - when buying many drives, to stagger potential failure, always good to get the drives from different places if you can, avoids getting the same drives from a similar batch which could then mean failure at the same time.

11

That has not been my experience when buying directly from NewEgg, not some third party vendor.

As for packaging, I’ve had good and a few bad incidents. But with the bad, they promply shipped a replacement and a return label for the damaged item.

12

Yeah, I did that the first time, this circumstance forced me to do two orders of 9 from two different vendors. I am burning in my cold spares for a few hundred hours and I am RAIDZ2 so I feel okay.

Sadly I bought from a reseller on New Egg, but they are working with me and promised to refund both purchases (They already refunded one order ahead of receiving the drives). I am pretty sure they knew they were sell used drives though.

13

That is good. I hope they make it right.

We all need to pay attention to who is selling us products. For the NewEgg website, if it isn’t shipped by NewEgg, I will not entertain the thought of purchasing it. I would rather pay a few more dollars just so I’m not jerked around with problems. Also use PayPal when you can, or a good Credit Card company so you can dispute a purchase and get your money back fast, if you are scammed.

I even like AliExpress, they seem to be very responsive to claims, even if the third party seller is not very responsive.

1 Like