“It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.”
More than 50 German buyers got new Seagate drives with 15,000 to 50,000 hours on them. The SMART data had been reset, and only the FARM logs showed the truth. Seagate blamed resellers and said the drives were OEM models with no retail warranty. The buyer loses either way.