Cheap Hard Drives

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to write a piece on cheap hard drives available from scam brands like Consistent, Geonix, Everstore, Matrix etc. Given that the Indian Judiciary sucks balls among other things, It was/is not at all surprising that these cheap hard drives are either refurbished or just plain scam of some sort. Lo and Behold Western Digital has filed a lawsuit against Geonix for selling old WD drives as rebranded (and brand new) Geonix drives. The defendant (Geonix) accepts that they use old WD drives (legally acquired) but they just rebrand it and misrepresent it which should be legal cuz their other scam call centers are legal too /s, the first part is not sarcasm though. These f***king scammers should rot in hell. F them






If these F***ers didn't wipe out the SMART data (which they do because there are errors) and instead of selling bad drives, they just sold refurbished drives with SMART intact, I would buy them in a heartbeat. The business model is simple, instead of doing the hard work of finding/sourcing working HDDs from data centers/institutions, they collect bad drives from some recycling company, wipe the SMART data off, and voila.

Either way, do not buy HDDs from unknown brands. HDDs unlike SSDs can't be made by your average Joe.

Edit:
In case someone missed.

rajch2002 said:

there was also article few weeks back that the recycling firms are basically getting the e-waste and selling on facebook! Looks like scammers are everywhere.

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What makes me sad is, I like to keep tech alive as long as I can. So let's assume your SMART tool (sentinal, crystal disk etc) shows BAD health, that doesn't necessarily mean the drive is bad. I can increase temps inside my Case with a lighter which will trigger one of the smart params for max temp and show as bad drive, or pull a drive while writing data to trigger uncorrectable errors. The point is I would happily buy them (if they were sold as is), reset SMART myself and use them for non critical/archival workloads.

And the audacity to claim that they could do that is astonishing. Sometime back I bought two consistent SSDs for research but they were atleast chinese made so cheaper to buy new from some back ally OEM.

rajch2002 said:

there was also article few weeks back that the recycling firms are basically getting the e-waste and selling on facebook! Looks like scammers are everywhere.

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One good thing is, you can RESET SMART (have done myself and anyone can) but not write your custom values (this needs some serious efforts and I haven't yet found a consistent way of doing it or tested myself). So if you get a drive with say 5000 power on hours, 99.9% of the time that would be correct. It's when everything is brand new that you should be concerned. Eitherway, zeroing your drives, surface scans and some stress testing should keep you safe.

nRiTeCh said:

Well, to disclose the horror such practices are prevalent since a long time than people could imagine. E-waste vendors sell the collected dump to some channel for refurbishing etc. which then makes ways to cybercafes, end users etc. Wiping SMART is so easy that even a 4th std kid could do it!

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Yup on point. Again I love recycling myself. If only these bastards sold them as such. Kinda feel sad about people who buy it, cuz they end up spending more money in the long run and loose data on the way.