eBay's purchase protection program doesn't really work!

[DiTBho]

I believe I know what has happened here.

You bought the disks with your understanding of “opened, never used” and that was an understandable view that the disks were unused, with no serious hours on them.

The seller stated the following in his auction……

“New or as good as new

All plates are in the original protective film and originally sealed”

I suspect that the eBay claim assessor saw your description of the problem and viewed it as unwarranted as all of the drives tested as working. They did not consider the hours run on the drives as a valid reason to award the claim to you. “As good as new” can be misinterpreted if it only related a to physical condition. If the drives had actual failures noted in the tests then I believe eBay would have found in your favour. This is not fair to you but the eBay claim agent may not be technical and may not appreciate that hours run on a drive most definitely affects whether it may be described as new or “as good as new”. EBay look for physical failures or cosmetic damage, not HDD SMART reports. They view it as “the drives are clearly working with no recorded errors so what are you complaining about”.

So, I made a phone call to eBay customer service, and it sounds like you described what happened perfectly.
They asked me to go to a store and ask to a tecniciatn to write down on formal paper, to be then scanned and email them, that those four defective disks are not as described.

Definitely misunderstood - Defect, what? - They don't understand the 6000 hours thing, for them, if they aren't broken, they're fine.

I could also do it, but it's a total waste of time, better to leave half the project alone and be comfortable with those four truly NOS discs.

[magic]

I'd have more trust in cheap Chinese SSD rather than those.

Do they even have the advertised capacity?

Also, this
http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-hard-drives-well-you-take-them-apart/

[SiliconWizard]

I'd have more trust in cheap Chinese SSD rather than those.

Do they even have the advertised capacity?

Also, this
http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-hard-drives-well-you-take-them-apart/

Yes, this is pretty typical.
In the same vein, I have seen cheap chinese tablets with great specs on paper. The tablets appeared to work properly, albeit not with the CPU performance and RAM size that would match what was advertised.
The advertised CPU and RAM size were reported as such in CPU-Z though and a number of other tools.
The installed Android was patched to report a false CPU ID and false RAM size.
 

[magic]

By the way, I had the exact same problem once, except buying one unit from a private person.

In that case, I ran photorec on the disk and recovered tons of the guy's personal files (family photos, videos, documents, you name it). Being kind guy I am, I emailed the seller and politely suggested that he must have accidentally sent me a wrong disk. Of course he denied everything, so I countered with a brief summary of all the content I found. He became cooperative very fast


Lesson: erase your disks properly before selling them as new.


Indeed, erase them, period. Now ntfsundelete and photorec are the next thing I run after smartctl on all used disks. And yes, I buy used disks. A good deal cheaper than new and still almost as good. HDD failures are a random thing, the only benefit of buying new is warranty and that matters only if it dies completely in the first two years.

A few thousand hours is practically a virgin

[wraper]

eBay and PayPal have parted ways as far as I've understood, so yeah there is no real benefit using PayPal now.

If you paid by paypal you still have their own purchase protection.

[DiTBho]

eBay and PayPal have parted ways as far as I've understood, so yeah there is no real benefit using PayPal now.

If you paid by paypal you still have their own purchase protection.

Yes, if you paid by Paypal but outside eBay you still have their own purchase protection.

When I tried to make a complaint on Paypal, they replied that it cannot be done for purchases made on eBay and paid for through them, you have to make a complaint on eBay.

It used to be possible, but not anymore, don't ask me why 

[DiTBho]

Lesson: erase your disks properly before selling them as new.

On three of the HDDs that were supposed to be "new, never used" to the seller-dude I found a few german comics scanned albums and a couple of movie, not even good entertainment quality like, but that's it, personal tastes, and a comprehensive documentary on the birds of Baviera Bird Watching? with route maps, several videos and photos that look like they were uploaded from an old smartphone and things like that.

It seems for "wild adventures" ... I just hope those discs were used anywhere that wasn't mobile, rather than in an camper, facing many obstacles along the way (I wish I could open them to check the condition of the bearings... too bad it can't be done without damage).

I don't have any problems, usually I don't even check the content. When a disk arrives, I check how many hours it has worked on, how many errors it has reported, then I test it with badblocks, finally I test it with programs that I have written to also understand how compatible the firmware and how fast IOP responeses are with embedded devices I work on.

When I sell a disk, in the same way I run badblocks to check that everything is ok, and in this operation the entire contents of are also deleted.

[DiTBho]

yes, I buy used disks

Where do you buy your disks?

A good deal cheaper than new and still almost as good. HDD failures are a random thing, the only benefit of buying new is warranty and that matters only if it dies completely in the first two years

This is damn true especially for SAS, SCSI and FC.

[Fraser]

A word of warning ….

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. The same applies to used laptops. You can really open a can of worms by recovering deleted data. I speak as a data forensics practitioner. The SMART data provides all you need to know about the health of a drive. Unsanctioned data recovery is just snooping and it can lead to a world of trouble if you find something you wish you had not.

Fraser

[nctnico]

over ~6000 hours (still with NTFS files in them, not even deleted)

Great! Any Bitcoins on these disks? 

[Veteran68]

Why would you even buy that garbage? Those drives are unreliable trash.
I'd have more trust in cheap Chinese SSD rather than those.

Why do you say that?
Many years ago I bought qty=32 of those Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002, never experienced a problem!

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]

Where do you buy your disks?

Local sites similar to eBay.
Nowadays I prefer commercial sellers due to no questions asked returns.

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.

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.

The SMART data provides all you need to know about the health of a drive.

While data provide additional hints about past workload.

Unsanctioned data recovery is just snooping

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]

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.

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.

[nctnico]

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...

More likely you and your friends are letting the drives run too hot.  Hard drives don't like high temperatures so I always made sure to make openings in the front panel slots to allow airflow along the hard drives. Back in the old days, PC casings where quite bad where it comes to cooling.

[Veteran68]

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...

More likely you and your friends are letting the drives run too hot.  Hard drives don't like high temperatures so I always made sure to make openings in the front panel slots to allow airflow along the hard drives. Back in the old days, PC casings where quite bad where it comes to cooling.

Well, two things:

1. We were installing multiple 120mm case fans before it was fashionable, back when cases came with 80mm fans if any at all. I have totes full of case fans like I have totes full of old HDDs. We weren't hacks, we knew what we were doing.

2. Even if true, Seagate were obviously more prone to such overheating failures than virtually every other brand we used. Hence, our reliability (or lack thereof) experience is still valid.

[DiTBho]

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. 

That's exactly what I did!

[soldar]

It is not only brands but types within brands.
Western Digital has families of drives for different purposes. General use are cheaper but less reliable.

WD Green Best for everyday light computing.
WD Blue Capacity-focused storage for creators.
WD Black High-performance drives specially-tuned for gaming.
WD Red Reliable HDDs & SSDs to boost performance and capacity of NAS systems.
WD Purple High-capacity smart video recording storage for 24/7 use.
WD Gold Reliable, performance drives for enterprise applications.

You gets what you pays for

[SiliconWizard]

It is not only brands but types within brands.
Western Digital has families of drives for different purposes. General use are cheaper but less reliable.

WD Green Best for everyday light computing.
WD Blue Capacity-focused storage for creators.
WD Black High-performance drives specially-tuned for gaming.
WD Red Reliable HDDs & SSDs to boost performance and capacity of NAS systems.
WD Purple High-capacity smart video recording storage for 24/7 use.
WD Gold Reliable, performance drives for enterprise applications.

You gets what you pays for

Yes of course. Now keep in mind that many of these families share a common design and only differ by, often, just firmware changes.
The Gold series are drives filled with helium (AFAIR and if I'm not mistaken), have specific firmware, and have been subjected to more stringent qualification tests, but other than this the base hardware is pretty close to the other ones.

[DiTBho]

So Hitachi is the best.
Umm, which Hitachi model of 500Gb do you suggest?
NAS application.

[SiliconWizard]

Used HDDs would be the last thing I'd buy from eBay

Where do you buy 2010 NOS s/ATA HDDs?
I rely on a physical store for NOS SCSI and FB disks, but they don't have sATA or SAS disks.

I said I wouldn't buy used HDDs on eBay. Actually I wouldn't buy used HDDs period, unless I had absolutely zero other choice, but in that case, I'd try anywhere rather than eBay, just too many crap on there these days.
This wasn't meant as advice.
And, pardon my ignorance, but what are 'NOS' disks?

[thm_w]

New Old Stock

Presumably most of the 500GB drives out there were produced a long time ago.

[SiliconWizard]

New Old Stock

Presumably most of the 500GB drives out there were produced a long time ago.

Oh yeah, dang.
Well, the HP store on Amazon has 500GB SAS drives: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Internal-Drive-2-5-Inch-Drives/dp/B007KWX55I
I would trust it a bit more than the average eBay seller, but I don't guarantee anything.

[DiTBho]

what are 'NOS' disks?

NOS = New Old Stock