Seagate responds to fraudulent hard drives scandal, says resellers should only buy from certified partners

Following a German outlet reporting that over fifty of its readers bought supposedly new Seagate hard drives that were actually used, the storage company tells Tom’s Hardware that resellers need to buy from certified Seagate partners.

A week ago, Heise.de published a story about how one of its readers purchased two Seagate HDDs that were advertised as new, but were discovered to have been used for over 10,000 hours. Yesterday, the publication posted a follow-up article after receiving emails from over fifty other readers who claimed they had also been ripped off and given used hard drives instead of the new ones they thought they had bought.

“Seagate did not sell or distribute these fraudulent drives to resellers,” Seagate said in a statement to Tom’s Hardware. “We recommend that resellers only purchase drives from certified Seagate distribution partners to ensure that they purchase and sell only new or factory-recertified Seagate drives.” Unfortunately, Seagate declined to comment on the particulars of how these HDDs ended up in the hands of customers.

Seagate’s statement implies that these stores wouldn’t have been implicated in selling fraudulent hard drives if they had obtained them from the storage company’s certified partners. We can’t know for sure if resellers were actually doing this, but if any retailers had acquired the fraudulent drives from non-certified sources, it might have been a big mistake.

But curiously, Heise.de notes that of the dozen stores that its readers allegedly bought the fraudulent drives from, five were on the list of certified partners. That’s not a great look, and it raises some questions about where those five retailers were getting their Seagate drives from, if not a reputable distributor or Seagate itself.

The storage outfit also told us that “hard drives that have been refurbished and factory-certified by Seagate and resold as part of the Seagate Drive Circularity Program can be identified by the green-bordered white hard drive label and the designation ‘Factory Recertified.’”

Heise.de noted that some of its readers did receive refurbished drives, but they were used for at least 15,000 hours, according to a Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) query. Seagate told the German outlet that it resets the usage time according to FARM, so a refurbished drive that hasn’t yet been used shouldn’t report thousands of hours of wear. It would seem that these drives were used, refurbished by Seagate, used again, and then resold as freshly refurbished models.

Although Seagate says it had no part in selling or distributing the fake HDDs, it does want affected customers to reach out via Seagate’s Ethics Helpline.