Hello everyone,

I recently purchased several used Seagate Exos enterprise HDDs. Although SMART appears normal, I suspect the seller may have used professional repair tools to hide previous bad sectors or modify SMART information. I have a few questions:
1. Is it possible to hide evidence of bad sectors on Seagate Exos drives?
2. Can tools such as MRT or PC-3000 modify SMART attributes or other drive information?
3. Besides SMART, what is the most reliable way to determine whether a drive has been manipulated?
4. Are there any logs, firmware records, G-list/P-list, self-test history, or other information that cannot be easily modified? I am not asking how to modify drives. I only want to know how professionals verify that a used enterprise HDD is genuine and has not been manipulated.

Thank you very much.

Have you examined the FARM logs?

I'm not a pro, but I would think that it may not be possible to determine whether grown defects have been transferred to the primary defect list. That's what is normally done when a drive is refurbished.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for your reply. I really appreciate it.

If I understand correctly, do you mean that bad sectors developed during the drive's lifetime may be transferred into the P-list during the refurbishment process, making them difficult or impossible to identify later?

If that's correct, how can I check the P-list and G-list on a Seagate drive? Is there any tool that can read the number of entries in each list?

Thank you!

Reallocated sectors are grown defects, so SMART will tell you that.

I'm not aware of any DIY tool that can dump the P-list.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Yes, that's right. If the seller used professional equipment and had the necessary knowledge, you won't be able to tell that the drive was refurbished this way.

I don't know what specific drives you have, but the theory behind these manipulations is as follows: you need to transfer the bad sector addresses from the g-list (defects detected during drive use) to the p-list (defects detected at the factory during drive production), and erase read errors and bad sector reassignment errors from the SMART log and SMART table. After this, no one will be able to tell the hard drive had any problems. Surprises usually begin after a few weeks or months of use if the drive was refurbished and sold in this manner.

As far as I know, it's quite difficult to clear the SMART table on Seagate and Samsung hard drives, removing information about defective sector reassignments. After transferring defects to the factory defect list, the SMART table was usually reset entirely.

I suggest Seatools which can zero wipe a disk to allow it to refresh blocks and swap in spares as needed. It works with all brands of disk which is why I use it.

After a zero wipe the disk will need to be partitioned and formatted fresh.

4K disks are far less problematic compared to the old 512 byte sector class disks

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