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| eBay's purchase protection program doesn't really work! |
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| Veteran68:
--- Quote from: DiTBho on September 26, 2023, 01:13:19 am --- --- Quote from: wraper on September 25, 2023, 08:13:01 pm ---Why would you even buy that garbage? Those drives are unreliable trash. I'd have more trust in cheap Chinese SSD rather than those. --- End quote --- Why do you say that? Many years ago I bought qty=32 of those Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002, never experienced a problem! --- End quote --- Well from personal experience, the LAST brand of HDD I would ever buy would be Seagate. At least back in the day, 20+ years ago, they had the worst reliability track record of any brand. Some perspective: I've built a LOT of computers, servers, and NAS boxes over the past 30 years. An accurate count would be hard, but I would easily put it in the several dozen. I belonged to a circle of friends who also built a lot of computers, and we shared a lot of experiences. And those HDD experiences were exactly the same: avoid Seagate like the plague. I still have boxes of dozens of HDDs from over those years, not counting the ones I've disposed of. I've used virtually every major brand, including IBM (pre-Hitachi), Maxtor (pre-Seagate), Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Samsung. Even among the several infamous IBM "Deathstar" 75GXP drives we had, they had a lower failure rate for us than Seagate -- I believe I had only one fail, and IBM replaced it with one which ran for a normal lifetime after. I recall at one time, after going many years avoiding Seagate, I figured surely they must have fixed their QA issues as they were still a top-selling brand and I would read positive reviews and articles about them. So I caved and bought a new Seagate... which promptly died within a year. Small sample size, sure, but it was a damning coincidence based on my and my group's collective prior history, and so I swore off them permanently after that. I could never wrap my head around the statistical probability of such a large maker with so many satisfied users, yet literally every single person I knew in person had terrible experiences with Seagates. I guess they just shipped all the questionable drives to my neck of the woods... EDIT: I forgot another evidentiary note about Seagate: BackBlaze (a cloud backup company I've subscribed to for years) builds their own open-source storage appliances from consumer HDDs. There was even a period during the HDD shortages years back they were buying external USB drives from Costco and other retailers in bulk and shucking them from their enclosures. These days they're mostly on SSDs but for years they've released an annual Drive Reliabity Study based on their thousands and thousands of drives purchased, across all brands. Back when I kept up with them, Seagate was always the ones with the highest failure rate. Their lowest failure rates were from Hitachi and Toshiba, which influenced my choice of brands. I've had dozens of both brands, many running 24/7 in NASes and servers, and have had an extremely low failure rate from them. I don't build as much these days and when I do I only use data center grade HDDs in my NAS now, all other drives are SSD, so I don't follow and keep up with current failure trends. |
| magic:
--- Quote from: DiTBho on September 26, 2023, 11:09:43 am ---Where do you buy your disks? --- End quote --- Local sites similar to eBay. Nowadays I prefer commercial sellers due to no questions asked returns. --- Quote from: Fraser on September 26, 2023, 11:12:15 am ---If you buy used hard disk drives. I recommend that you do not attempt to recover deleted material from them. If you find something highly illegal you are then faced with deciding whether to report it and also the potential contamination of your computers drive with the recovered material. It is better to carry out a high grade erasure of the hard disk and remain in ignorance as to what it used to contain. --- End quote --- If you know how to erase disks then you can first take a peek and then decide if you have erased the disk and remained in ignorance ;) Though I guess there exists some risk of encountering malware, which may have a life of its own and try to escape erasure. --- Quote from: Fraser on September 26, 2023, 11:12:15 am ---The SMART data provides all you need to know about the health of a drive. --- End quote --- While data provide additional hints about past workload. --- Quote from: Fraser on September 26, 2023, 11:12:15 am ---Unsanctioned data recovery is just snooping --- End quote --- Morally, yes, maybe. Legally, screw anyone who thinks you don't have a right to inspect hardware you have bought. |
| andy2000:
When opening a return, I've used screen shots, or even just a picture of the item with a note on it. I've never had a picture questioned, or a return declined. Just recently, I returned a defective SSD using a screen shot of Windows setup saying the drive couldn't be formatted. I think the picture requirement is just there to reduce fraudulent returns rather the providing absolute proof. In your case, I would have provided a screen shot showing the hours, and the serial number for each drive, plus a picture of the drives with the serial numbers visible. Having said that, if the drives were cheap enough, and otherwise working properly, I probably would have just let it go, and just not used that seller again. 6000 hours isn't that much for a hard drive. |
| magic:
--- Quote from: andy2000 on September 26, 2023, 05:57:18 pm ---I think the picture requirement is just there to reduce fraudulent returns rather the providing absolute proof. In your case, I would have provided a screen shot showing the hours, and the serial number for each drive, plus a picture of the drives with the serial numbers visible. --- End quote --- Yes, if there are stupid rules that don't cost too much to follow, just follow them. I once uploaded (to AliExpress) a video of myself measuring output from a bunch of chips with a DMM. It doesn't matter, they will understand none of it anyway. They wanted a video, I gave them one. They ruled in my favor. |
| DiTBho:
An old topic here on EEVblog. |
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