Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spins-up-a-raid-on-a-counterfeit-hard-drive-workshop-authorities-read-criminals-writes-while-they-spill-the-beans

by gjvc • 11 months ago

110 47 11 months ago

tomshardware.com

xattt• 11 months ago

I expect this headline from The Inquirer (rip) but not THG.

JSR_FDED2• 11 months ago

I read that there were two identical workshops right next to each other, and that they needed to raid both of them to make absolutely sure.

washadjeffmad• 11 months ago

The planning report had a lot of good details, like how the teams should consider neither raid to be their backup.

JSR_FDED2• 11 months ago

I don’t think they had a backup plan

clickety_clack2• 11 months ago

Did they say how they dealt with corruption?

kotaKat• 11 months ago

I thought the law enforcement was just converting the array of crimes into a RAID 5-0 configuration.

cm2187• 11 months ago

where did you raid that?

catlikesshrimp• 11 months ago

There is clearly no redundancy check in their procedures.

BeetleB• 11 months ago

Did they discover that the counterfeits were more reliable than their own drives?

MrGilbert2• 11 months ago

They are their drives. They are reset and re-sold as new.

rsync2• 11 months ago

The supply chain - especially for SSDs - is full of old parts being sold as new:

https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/

... some vendors have been found tampering with SMART data which can be done on certain models ...

In the post-chia[1] landscape, I would advise extreme caution in sourcing drives and a decent shortcut is to not buy from Amazon ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network

MrGilbert2• 11 months ago

The original Heise news in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-A...

mdip3• 11 months ago

This is interesting, it really sounds like they were running a pretty normal salvage operation with the evil twist of "they were selling the salvaged drives as new" -- kinda feels like dialing back the odometer on a car.

Barring that "evil twist", they'd not be doing anything all that uncommon/illegal but refurbished hard drives and the companies that sell them have been a bit scammy/"buyer beware" hardware for as long as I can remember.

Back in the early 90s, I spent a year saving up for and building the best 486 PC I could buy. I went with a 330MB[0] SCSI drive that I picked up from a small magazine advertisement in Computer Shopper. They advertised it as refurbished, and there was no such thing as SMART parameters to reset (were there even counters of any kind back then, I can't remember?) so there was no way to tell how long it had been used except for the price. These were more than half off.

It seemed shady, the price was still several hundred dollars (though, I want to say something like $500 off of the cheapest new option) and being a dumb teenager, I called the number and placed the order.

My heart sunk a bit when it arrived. If memory serves, this was the one that came with all but one of the threaded screw slots completely stripped (of the four I needed to use given my case). Technically, they were all stripped, but one of them still had the screw -- left behind, evidently, because it became welded to the hole.

After some delicate work with a metal file, I got it all installed and nothing worked. So I called the manufacturer who took about ten seconds to find the problem: That's a Differential SCSI drive. It took another few minutes for him to explain what that meant. There was no mention of this in the advertisement (they didn't even include the model number, just "330GB SCSI DRIVES!" I think these were common in AS/400s or something along those lines.

fsck.

So ... I bought a differential SCSI controller, cable and terminator, which set me back more than half of the savings from the drive. Because, as a teenager, I hadn't learned about the sunk cost fallacy.

I hadn't appreciated, then, what a miracle it was that when everything was plugged in correctly, it all worked and continued to work until I upgraded the drive. The thing was extremely loud (occasionally making a unique sound similar to when wood hits a circular saw, like the magnetic head was grinding off some of the platter -- given its size, it had plenty of room to chisel the bits onto the surface ...). It was a massive heat source for not just the case, but the room. But it served my stupid BBS for several years, somehow.

[0] It's been so long, I may not have that capacity right. It was 3-4 times what was typical at that time (I ran a BBS with file"z"). It was a 5.25" drive that required a full height slot (it was about 3/4 full height) to give you an idea.

lazide• 11 months ago

Well yeah? Selling refurbished as refurbished is a-ok. Selling them as new is fraud?

mdip3• 11 months ago

I didn't make that point clearly enough in my comment ... my point, somewhat lost due to lack of brevity was "looks like some of the least reputable HDD salvage outfits discovered some a way to ditch the last problem of selling refurbished HDDs by making them look 'new'."

I assume that was the original business this outfit was involved in, anyway, since most of those companies are shady, already. :)

FireBeyond• 11 months ago

Not really the same thing, but your story reminded me of a long forgotten story.

I remember being in a computer store, and this woman was being told she should buy a 2x SCSI CDR, rather than the 8x IDE one she'd been eyeing (plus controller and cables, etc., of course), "Because SCSI is a much better interface and performs better so the two-speed drive will be faster than the eight".

I couldn't let that go, waited til the sales guy stopped buzzing, and told her the truth of the matter, and showed the specs... 300KB/s versus 1200KB/s has nothing to do with the interface. Yeah, the bus or whatever might be more performant (and do its own controlling, versus offloading), but immaterial.

hakfoo• 11 months ago

At the time that was relevant, wasn't SCSI specifically preferred for recording because IDE was particularly vulnerable when you had Windows 9x's mediocre multitasking and tiny buffers? I know there was very much a window of "close every other piece of software while burning".

An 8x SCSI drive would be preferrable to an 8x IDE drive, but he was obviously trying to sell what thought he could unload with that half-truth.

I know even long after IDE was mainstreamed, cost-no-object builds (think Boot/Maximum PC's annual Dream Machine) would have SCSI for reasons like that.

flufluflufluffy2• 11 months ago

Full headline: “Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop — authorities read criminals' writes while they spill the beans”

The writer waited his entire life for this moment xD

dleary• 11 months ago

That headline is a stunning achievement. I honestly wish there were some way to better call attention to it.

I would have missed it if it weren't for your comment.

gjvc2• 11 months ago

i'll include the full headline as the first comment next time i come across a long one.

thebruce87m• 11 months ago

My favourite headlines over the years:

“Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Caley_go_ballistic,_Ce...

And

“Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...

hinkley• 11 months ago

I can only read this in the style of the radio announcer in the musical Annie.

Thank you, Bert Healy.

bogeholm• 11 months ago

Agree - a magnificent headline, and they really seized the day with raid ;)

rconti• 11 months ago

Sounds like they found quite the cache of counterfeit drives.

supportengineer• 11 months ago

There was a FAT stack of evidence

CPLX• 11 months ago

It’s clever but shouldn’t it be “read criminals rights”?

Or is it even more clever than I can parse?

me-vs-cat• 11 months ago

read criminals' writes while they spill the beans

Could be criminals are spilling the beans by writing down confessions. (I don't know the original intent.)

flufluflufluffy2• 11 months ago

it’s a play on reading/writing data

phyzome2• 11 months ago

I feel like we need a different word from "counterfeit" here -- they're real Seagate drives, after all.

HPsquared2• 11 months ago

Mislabeled?

phyzome2• 11 months ago

Or something involving the word "fraud".

dataflow• 11 months ago

I'm confused by Seagate's response. Why didn't they focus on making the SMART data tamper-proof?

rootsudo• 11 months ago

It feels the writer is trying to hard. If you’ve used shoppe/lazada, it’s not hard to see the return address on the site or the package.

And organized criminality is unlikely, more or less ewaste recycler got a ton of hdds, wants to maximize, hired people to do the physical and not be around. If that’s organized criminal activity akin to how the writer described it.. eh it’s really weak.

More fraud happens on eBay daily and I haven’t heard any of this go down in the USA …

But yeah resetting smart values bad.

To write as if it’s the next cartel driven industry, no.

Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop

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