so it seems the seller of the Exos drives is going to refund me… have to first see money in account before i get happy…
Now continue fight with the seller of the original 5 x Ironwolfs…
But now what… still need to replace at min 1 if not 2 drives from my disk pool… Think Joe might agree ;), Mind you the plan was to get this base 5 drive RaidZ2 build and then expand it to 8->12 drives… for now just been stuck at 5, nursing them…
never mind the plan to switch to a C612 MB / Kitt with more PCI slots…
At the moment… thinking of making a case for it out of shutter ply with a Micro ATX chassis plate fixed and 3D print HDD cages, to nicely fit in my 19" network rack, only have 500mm deep to work with… luckily have height,
drives locally are just about double the price for same space…
I"ll second, third this one… would be great if a db of sort can be created on the machine, with exactly when a HDD/Serial was introduced into the system, with maybe some min records…
Att he moment the smartctl logs are associated with the /dev/sdX number… would be great if they can rather be associated with the drive serial.
Bummer…
With any “refurbished” drive being suspicious at the moment, the best fallback would be to find second-hand hard drives from a reputable non-professional seller on small ads/forums.
There’s a Polish seller on ServeTheHome which seems to have regular supply of 20 TB Seagate drives. I got a set of Exos X20 from him: Used for sure, but SMART and FARM data did match what they were sold for, this lot was still under warranty until 2027… and as a bonus I could skip the usual burn-in routine, which would have been well over one week at this size.
Was trying to troubleshoot why I was having so many issues with my “new” EXOS 16TB drives over the last few months. Found this thread and of course all 9 drives are 25000+ hours in the FARM data compared to the 4000+ hours since I’ve had them. Sadly I’ve had them too long for a credit card chargeback so have requested to return and refund them. Will see how that goes.
An Update… and please make sure this goes far and wide…
It seems AliExpress has decide not to refund the drive… they are also ignoring all comms with regard to the first 5 drives, Ironwolfs, their view they did refund me… well that was for the first drive that failed…
They now blind “death” just responding declined, this after the seller even said raise a refund request, after i provided the SMART and FARM logs and a link to the articles.
MY view, their actions say they are condoning the sell of these drives… and that I don’t accept.
I’m sorry your trust was taken advantage of, it underscores why I don’t buy anything on aliExpress that I wouldn’t mind not getting. Sadly, there are scammers on all platforms that get away with it.
Hmmm…. There is the element of willful ignorance. Ie you should know better because whatever you’re selling is way too cheap to not having “fallen off a truck”, not being new, or whatever.
There will be instances where folk sell a limited set of goods due to exigent circumstances at a very low price (aka fire sale prices) but that does not square with large quantities of “new”, OEM-warranteed merchandise.
Realise… that any electronics coming into this country goes through 20 hands, each wanting their cut… making things crazy expensive…
if you look at the price of these drives, and compare otherwise international they are aligned, implying they are not like 50% of price raising questions.
The items are listed as new… so honestly i don’t care what the price is really… they are advertised as new, and if anything other then it’s actually fraud.
now i’ve made it clear to AliExpress I dont hold them or the seller responsible as far as knowing… what i’m asking for is a refund… and the seller is more than welcome to have the drive collected…
their view, i have not provided prove… hear this one, they want me to send them a video proving its not new, how i installed it… it’s like it’s actually a AI doing all the responses and simply not understanding.
Another thing, my view… once this has been explained to AliExpress, if they continue to deny refund, it is then for me that they are “approving” / “signing of” not heir sellers selling a known tampered with drive, and calling it new… again… fraud.
Don’t wanna go off topic or be the advocate of AliExpress… But my experience on refund/return has been totally different.
I have to admit, i never had buy HD, but a lot of SSD/NVME.
Were those disks sell as Choice? Because this formula grant 90 days of time to return goods, either if you just change mind (At least for my country).
Just few days ago i realised to have ordered a wrong module > ask for return > and they charge me in 5 minutes the price without need to ship back anything. And this Is not the only case. Only one time i have had to ship back the good, but without pay the cost (prepaid label).
IMHO don’t give up and reclame your money
And I ordered 40 iPad cases, and the quality was so bad that 50% would not even fit.
They asked me to take a picture of every single one of them, just to later go on onto that I have to send them back.
I am sure Topton offers great computers, but RMA something into China is just not my cup of tea. Heck, some of my domestic sellers are such a PITA when it comes to RMA that I no longer buy from them.
same here on the lego side… got a scary amount on shelves…
My, My wife and both kids builds you can imagine the damage to the wallet.
I do Technic, wife does Architecture, me and my son do Star Wars and my daughter is some most recently into the cosplay/journey from the west and some “friends” series.
ye… agree… these days… local or remote, you are screwed by the service…
and the hoops they want you to jump through to get a refund, you can see a mile away it’s a game…
will keep on trying though…
But I would also be going onto every forum i am part of and make sure everyone knows that this is now happening with AliExpress knowledge and they can’t be bothered to do anything about it.
So Aliexpress is closing all my dispute cases and refusing to entertain any further conversation.
Their view is I’m not supplying enough proof…
At this point for me it now makes them complicit in the fraud. Before they and their dealers were unknowingly selling these tampered drives, they now know about it, refusing to do anything about it, which makes them in my view just as guilty as the people tampering with the FARM and SMART data.
