This is interesting, it really sounds like they were running a pretty normal salvage operation with the evil twist of "they were selling the salvaged drives as new" -- kinda feels like dialing back the odometer on a car.
Barring that "evil twist", they'd not be doing anything all that uncommon/illegal but refurbished hard drives and the companies that sell them have been a bit scammy/"buyer beware" hardware for as long as I can remember.
Back in the early 90s, I spent a year saving up for and building the best 486 PC I could buy. I went with a 330MB[0] SCSI drive that I picked up from a small magazine advertisement in Computer Shopper. They advertised it as refurbished, and there was no such thing as SMART parameters to reset (were there even counters of any kind back then, I can't remember?) so there was no way to tell how long it had been used except for the price. These were more than half off.
It seemed shady, the price was still several hundred dollars (though, I want to say something like $500 off of the cheapest new option) and being a dumb teenager, I called the number and placed the order.
My heart sunk a bit when it arrived. If memory serves, this was the one that came with all but one of the threaded screw slots completely stripped (of the four I needed to use given my case). Technically, they were all stripped, but one of them still had the screw -- left behind, evidently, because it became welded to the hole.
After some delicate work with a metal file, I got it all installed and nothing worked. So I called the manufacturer who took about ten seconds to find the problem: That's a Differential SCSI drive. It took another few minutes for him to explain what that meant. There was no mention of this in the advertisement (they didn't even include the model number, just "330GB SCSI DRIVES!" I think these were common in AS/400s or something along those lines.
fsck.
So ... I bought a differential SCSI controller, cable and terminator, which set me back more than half of the savings from the drive. Because, as a teenager, I hadn't learned about the sunk cost fallacy.
I hadn't appreciated, then, what a miracle it was that when everything was plugged in correctly, it all worked and continued to work until I upgraded the drive. The thing was extremely loud (occasionally making a unique sound similar to when wood hits a circular saw, like the magnetic head was grinding off some of the platter -- given its size, it had plenty of room to chisel the bits onto the surface ...). It was a massive heat source for not just the case, but the room. But it served my stupid BBS for several years, somehow.
[0] It's been so long, I may not have that capacity right. It was 3-4 times what was typical at that time (I ran a BBS with file"z"). It was a 5.25" drive that required a full height slot (it was about 3/4 full height) to give you an idea.
I didn't make that point clearly enough in my comment ... my point, somewhat lost due to lack of brevity was "looks like some of the least reputable HDD salvage outfits discovered some a way to ditch the last problem of selling refurbished HDDs by making them look 'new'."
I assume that was the original business this outfit was involved in, anyway, since most of those companies are shady, already. :)
Not really the same thing, but your story reminded me of a long forgotten story.
I remember being in a computer store, and this woman was being told she should buy a 2x SCSI CDR, rather than the 8x IDE one she'd been eyeing (plus controller and cables, etc., of course), "Because SCSI is a much better interface and performs better so the two-speed drive will be faster than the eight".
I couldn't let that go, waited til the sales guy stopped buzzing, and told her the truth of the matter, and showed the specs... 300KB/s versus 1200KB/s has nothing to do with the interface. Yeah, the bus or whatever might be more performant (and do its own controlling, versus offloading), but immaterial.
At the time that was relevant, wasn't SCSI specifically preferred for recording because IDE was particularly vulnerable when you had Windows 9x's mediocre multitasking and tiny buffers? I know there was very much a window of "close every other piece of software while burning".
An 8x SCSI drive would be preferrable to an 8x IDE drive, but he was obviously trying to sell what thought he could unload with that half-truth.
I know even long after IDE was mainstreamed, cost-no-object builds (think Boot/Maximum PC's annual Dream Machine) would have SCSI for reasons like that.
I know I went with SCSI, originally, because I had actually purchased two drives -- the huge one, and another one that was a bit faster but smaller and something had led me to believe that SCSI lent itself better to that configuration. I can't remember, specifically, what though.
I recall with CD-ROM drives -- earlier ones -- it was similar. Actually, in a few ways it was worse because the earliest CD-ROM drives came as SCSI or "Parallel Port to SCSI" which I'm not sure anyone ever got to work completely right.
But ... and I could just Google it but I'm being lazy ... I recall it had something to do with Bus Disconnection and Native Command Queuing in SCSI that allowed the CD-ROM drive and the HDD to operate without waiting on one another (as much?).
I know SCSI drives basically disappeared once IDE drives became common. You didn't see SCSI controllers often outside of servers, ever, in the PC world except for a brief period when that was the most common CD-ROM drive.
It feels the writer is trying to hard. If you’ve used shoppe/lazada, it’s not hard to see the return address on the site or the package.
And organized criminality is unlikely, more or less ewaste recycler got a ton of hdds, wants to maximize, hired people to do the physical and not be around. If that’s organized criminal activity akin to how the writer described it.. eh it’s really weak.
More fraud happens on eBay daily and I haven’t heard any of this go down in the USA …
But yeah resetting smart values bad.
To write as if it’s the next cartel driven industry, no.
The excitement with Chia was really something else. It was supposed to be the "green" crypto, because crypto is in a bad enough state that "buying exabytes of hard drives" is considered the green approach.
I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
You can get refurb drives for $10/TB, so if you had cheap electricity or excess solar or something and somehow had the network connection to receive that data in a reasonable time, that's over a 10% annual "dividend yield". Not bad at all.
You'd have to calculate this in drive-hours for it to make sense at all. Those drives won't last long enough to pay for themselves at that rate, even assuming that the per TB return on this failing cryptocurrency that you hear nothing about remains steady for a decade.
>I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
Mining profits always trends towards zero. To make actual money (or any at all), you need massive economies of scale, lean operations, and advantages compared to your competitor (eg. cheap source of HDDs or electricity).
> Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
I'm guessing the $26/month figure you've calculated is based on the current price of something? I'm also guessing whoever is doing that right now, has calculated that the price would move in a particular direction, maybe then it makes more sense (in their mind).
Feels unfortunate that their proof-of-space is just (to my understanding) random data. Would've thought that proof-of-space might be more amenable to having the proof be actually useful, since you can check the right data was returned with a hash (whereas only some computation-based tasks are verifiable) and data can be encrypted (whereas only limited computation can be done with homomorphic encryption).
If you think this, it is evidence that you are not at all familiar with any of these subjects. People say this thousands of times a day across any threads about any of them.
SSDs and USB flash drives in particular are full of sketchy NAND flash chips.
Some of those chips are straight up salvaged from other electronics. Some are "known bad" chips, hanging in by a thread while the flash controller is fighting to sweep all the bad blocks under the rug. Some are dead MicroSD cards - with the dead MicroSD controllers bypassed to access the NAND die directly.
NAND flash chips are "everything but the squeal" of electronics. There is a lot of chips that "somewhat work", and a lot of people trying to "upcycle" them into something that works long enough to be sold.
It’s not that Chia is more intensive than any other high usage activity…
Rather, it is a combination of a highly intensive use case and a relatively morally bankrupt user base that results in a supply chain full of burned out SSDs.
I say relatively morally bankrupt… I am sure there are many delightful people out there mining Chia coin …
I recently bought some 8TB SSDs that were obviously Samsungs, but had no serial or capacity label. They came at a steep discount, so some shenanigans were expected, and they're in a mirrored setup, so my data is safe-ish. I just have no idea why they're missing the labels.
First thing I (and a lot of people) do with a drive is encrypt the volume and write zeros to the entire thing. Otherwise, you're leaking information about how much is on them after you encrypt them for your own needs. Once they've been "erased" they're ready to use (or give away to friends.)
edit: of course who knows what's on the hardware, but I haven't heard of the exploit that would doom me.
Full headline: “Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop — authorities read criminals' writes while they spill the beans”
The writer waited his entire life for this moment xD
That headline is a stunning achievement. I honestly wish there were some way to better call attention to it.
I would have missed it if it weren't for your comment.
i'll include the full headline as the first comment next time i come across a long one.
Sounds like they found quite the cache of counterfeit drives.
There was a FAT stack of evidence
I'd worry it's only a small sector of the counter-fitting operation.
We should EXTerminate these criminals...
It’s clever but shouldn’t it be “read criminals rights”?
Or is it even more clever than I can parse?
> read criminals' writes while they spill the beans
Could be criminals are spilling the beans by writing down confessions. (I don't know the original intent.)
it’s a play on reading/writing data
I can only read this in the style of the radio announcer in the musical Annie.
Thank you, Bert Healy.
My favourite headlines over the years:
“Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Caley_go_ballistic,_Ce...
And
“Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
Agree - a magnificent headline, and they really seized the day with raid ;)
I read that there were two identical workshops right next to each other, and that they needed to raid both of them to make absolutely sure.
I thought the law enforcement was just converting the array of crimes into a RAID 5-0 configuration.
The planning report had a lot of good details, like how the teams should consider neither raid to be their backup.
Did they say how they dealt with corruption?
That bit was missing.
Thank god they had the right address then.
They need to get accounting to check the sums.
I don’t think they had a backup plan
There is clearly no redundancy check in their procedures.
where did you raid that?
The original Heise news in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-A...
This is interesting, it really sounds like they were running a pretty normal salvage operation with the evil twist of "they were selling the salvaged drives as new" -- kinda feels like dialing back the odometer on a car.
Barring that "evil twist", they'd not be doing anything all that uncommon/illegal but refurbished hard drives and the companies that sell them have been a bit scammy/"buyer beware" hardware for as long as I can remember.
Back in the early 90s, I spent a year saving up for and building the best 486 PC I could buy. I went with a 330MB[0] SCSI drive that I picked up from a small magazine advertisement in Computer Shopper. They advertised it as refurbished, and there was no such thing as SMART parameters to reset (were there even counters of any kind back then, I can't remember?) so there was no way to tell how long it had been used except for the price. These were more than half off.
It seemed shady, the price was still several hundred dollars (though, I want to say something like $500 off of the cheapest new option) and being a dumb teenager, I called the number and placed the order.
My heart sunk a bit when it arrived. If memory serves, this was the one that came with all but one of the threaded screw slots completely stripped (of the four I needed to use given my case). Technically, they were all stripped, but one of them still had the screw -- left behind, evidently, because it became welded to the hole.
After some delicate work with a metal file, I got it all installed and nothing worked. So I called the manufacturer who took about ten seconds to find the problem: That's a Differential SCSI drive. It took another few minutes for him to explain what that meant. There was no mention of this in the advertisement (they didn't even include the model number, just "330GB SCSI DRIVES!" I think these were common in AS/400s or something along those lines.
fsck.
So ... I bought a differential SCSI controller, cable and terminator, which set me back more than half of the savings from the drive. Because, as a teenager, I hadn't learned about the sunk cost fallacy.
I hadn't appreciated, then, what a miracle it was that when everything was plugged in correctly, it all worked and continued to work until I upgraded the drive. The thing was extremely loud (occasionally making a unique sound similar to when wood hits a circular saw, like the magnetic head was grinding off some of the platter -- given its size, it had plenty of room to chisel the bits onto the surface ...). It was a massive heat source for not just the case, but the room. But it served my stupid BBS for several years, somehow.
[0] It's been so long, I may not have that capacity right. It was 3-4 times what was typical at that time (I ran a BBS with file"z"). It was a 5.25" drive that required a full height slot (it was about 3/4 full height) to give you an idea.
Well yeah? Selling refurbished as refurbished is a-ok. Selling them as new is fraud?
I didn't make that point clearly enough in my comment ... my point, somewhat lost due to lack of brevity was "looks like some of the least reputable HDD salvage outfits discovered some a way to ditch the last problem of selling refurbished HDDs by making them look 'new'."
I assume that was the original business this outfit was involved in, anyway, since most of those companies are shady, already. :)
Not really the same thing, but your story reminded me of a long forgotten story.
I remember being in a computer store, and this woman was being told she should buy a 2x SCSI CDR, rather than the 8x IDE one she'd been eyeing (plus controller and cables, etc., of course), "Because SCSI is a much better interface and performs better so the two-speed drive will be faster than the eight".
I couldn't let that go, waited til the sales guy stopped buzzing, and told her the truth of the matter, and showed the specs... 300KB/s versus 1200KB/s has nothing to do with the interface. Yeah, the bus or whatever might be more performant (and do its own controlling, versus offloading), but immaterial.
At the time that was relevant, wasn't SCSI specifically preferred for recording because IDE was particularly vulnerable when you had Windows 9x's mediocre multitasking and tiny buffers? I know there was very much a window of "close every other piece of software while burning".
An 8x SCSI drive would be preferrable to an 8x IDE drive, but he was obviously trying to sell what thought he could unload with that half-truth.
I know even long after IDE was mainstreamed, cost-no-object builds (think Boot/Maximum PC's annual Dream Machine) would have SCSI for reasons like that.
Oh man, you're bringing back memories.
I know I went with SCSI, originally, because I had actually purchased two drives -- the huge one, and another one that was a bit faster but smaller and something had led me to believe that SCSI lent itself better to that configuration. I can't remember, specifically, what though.
I recall with CD-ROM drives -- earlier ones -- it was similar. Actually, in a few ways it was worse because the earliest CD-ROM drives came as SCSI or "Parallel Port to SCSI" which I'm not sure anyone ever got to work completely right.
But ... and I could just Google it but I'm being lazy ... I recall it had something to do with Bus Disconnection and Native Command Queuing in SCSI that allowed the CD-ROM drive and the HDD to operate without waiting on one another (as much?).
I know SCSI drives basically disappeared once IDE drives became common. You didn't see SCSI controllers often outside of servers, ever, in the PC world except for a brief period when that was the most common CD-ROM drive.
It feels the writer is trying to hard. If you’ve used shoppe/lazada, it’s not hard to see the return address on the site or the package.
And organized criminality is unlikely, more or less ewaste recycler got a ton of hdds, wants to maximize, hired people to do the physical and not be around. If that’s organized criminal activity akin to how the writer described it.. eh it’s really weak.
More fraud happens on eBay daily and I haven’t heard any of this go down in the USA …
But yeah resetting smart values bad.
To write as if it’s the next cartel driven industry, no.
I expect this headline from The Inquirer (rip) but not THG.
I'm confused by Seagate's response. Why didn't they focus on making the SMART data tamper-proof?
I feel like we need a different word from "counterfeit" here -- they're real Seagate drives, after all.
Mislabeled?
Or something involving the word "fraud".
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The excitement with Chia was really something else. It was supposed to be the "green" crypto, because crypto is in a bad enough state that "buying exabytes of hard drives" is considered the green approach.
I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
You can get refurb drives for $10/TB, so if you had cheap electricity or excess solar or something and somehow had the network connection to receive that data in a reasonable time, that's over a 10% annual "dividend yield". Not bad at all.
You'd have to calculate this in drive-hours for it to make sense at all. Those drives won't last long enough to pay for themselves at that rate, even assuming that the per TB return on this failing cryptocurrency that you hear nothing about remains steady for a decade.
There are probably better ways to many money from cheap electricity.
>I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
Mining profits always trends towards zero. To make actual money (or any at all), you need massive economies of scale, lean operations, and advantages compared to your competitor (eg. cheap source of HDDs or electricity).
> Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?
I'm guessing the $26/month figure you've calculated is based on the current price of something? I'm also guessing whoever is doing that right now, has calculated that the price would move in a particular direction, maybe then it makes more sense (in their mind).
Feels unfortunate that their proof-of-space is just (to my understanding) random data. Would've thought that proof-of-space might be more amenable to having the proof be actually useful, since you can check the right data was returned with a hash (whereas only some computation-based tasks are verifiable) and data can be encrypted (whereas only limited computation can be done with homomorphic encryption).
> And for the record: fuck cryptocurrencies. All of them. So much wasted hardware, all for nothing in the end.
I must be the only dummy that sees the parallels between crypto, NFTs, and LLMs…
If you think this, it is evidence that you are not at all familiar with any of these subjects. People say this thousands of times a day across any threads about any of them.
Sure thing.
I read this site a lot, I don’t see this said often, at all.
Got links? 50 or so would prove your point.
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Did they discover that the counterfeits were more reliable than their own drives?
They are their drives. They are reset and re-sold as new.
The supply chain - especially for SSDs - is full of old parts being sold as new:
https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/
... some vendors have been found tampering with SMART data which can be done on certain models ...
In the post-chia[1] landscape, I would advise extreme caution in sourcing drives and a decent shortcut is to not buy from Amazon ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network
SSDs and USB flash drives in particular are full of sketchy NAND flash chips.
Some of those chips are straight up salvaged from other electronics. Some are "known bad" chips, hanging in by a thread while the flash controller is fighting to sweep all the bad blocks under the rug. Some are dead MicroSD cards - with the dead MicroSD controllers bypassed to access the NAND die directly.
NAND flash chips are "everything but the squeal" of electronics. There is a lot of chips that "somewhat work", and a lot of people trying to "upcycle" them into something that works long enough to be sold.
Is Chia particularly harder on drives then other typical uses? Speaking as someone who wouldn't say no to a stack of cheap, used, multi-TB drives.
It’s not that Chia is more intensive than any other high usage activity…
Rather, it is a combination of a highly intensive use case and a relatively morally bankrupt user base that results in a supply chain full of burned out SSDs.
I say relatively morally bankrupt… I am sure there are many delightful people out there mining Chia coin …
I recently bought some 8TB SSDs that were obviously Samsungs, but had no serial or capacity label. They came at a steep discount, so some shenanigans were expected, and they're in a mirrored setup, so my data is safe-ish. I just have no idea why they're missing the labels.
I'm very paranoid but I wouldn't want the responsibility of a databrack which I didn't know the history of.
Anything could be on there
First thing I (and a lot of people) do with a drive is encrypt the volume and write zeros to the entire thing. Otherwise, you're leaking information about how much is on them after you encrypt them for your own needs. Once they've been "erased" they're ready to use (or give away to friends.)
edit: of course who knows what's on the hardware, but I haven't heard of the exploit that would doom me.
no serial number == stolen
Could also mean gray market.