Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop
53 comments
·August 16, 2025flufluflufluffy
dleary
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.
gjvc
i'll include the full headline as the first comment next time i come across a long one.
rconti
Sounds like they found quite the cache of counterfeit drives.
supportengineer
There was a FAT stack of evidence
snapplebobapple
We should EXTerminate these criminals...
BuildTheRobots
I'd worry it's only a small sector of the counter-fitting operation.
hinkley
I can only read this in the style of the radio announcer in the musical Annie.
Thank you, Bert Healy.
bogeholm
Agree - a magnificent headline, and they really seized the day with raid ;)
CPLX
It’s clever but shouldn’t it be “read criminals rights”?
Or is it even more clever than I can parse?
me-vs-cat
> 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.)
flufluflufluffy
it’s a play on reading/writing data
thebruce87m
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...
JSR_FDED
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.
kotaKat
I thought the law enforcement was just converting the array of crimes into a RAID 5-0 configuration.
washadjeffmad
The planning report had a lot of good details, like how the teams should consider neither raid to be their backup.
clickety_clack
Did they say how they dealt with corruption?
Fade_Dance
That bit was missing.
HPsquared
They need to get accounting to check the sums.
JSR_FDED
I don’t think they had a backup plan
cm2187
where did you raid that?
catlikesshrimp
There is clearly no redundancy check in their procedures.
MrGilbert
The original Heise news in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-A...
rootsudo
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.
mdip
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.
lazide
Well yeah? Selling refurbished as refurbished is a-ok. Selling them as new is fraud?
dataflow
I'm confused by Seagate's response. Why didn't they focus on making the SMART data tamper-proof?
xattt
I expect this headline from The Inquirer (rip) but not THG.
phyzome
I feel like we need a different word from "counterfeit" here -- they're real Seagate drives, after all.
VoodooJuJu
[dead]
mschuster91
[flagged]
protimewaster
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?
ndriscoll
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.
HPsquared
There are probably better ways to many money from cheap electricity.
pessimizer
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.
gruez
>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).
diggan
> 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).
Ukv
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).
dgfitz
> 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…
pessimizer
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.
dgfitz
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.
gazpachotron
[dead]
BeetleB
Did they discover that the counterfeits were more reliable than their own drives?
MrGilbert
They are their drives. They are reset and re-sold as new.
rsync
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 ...
MadnessASAP
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.
ACCount37
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.
dehrmann
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.
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