Dear HDD fellas and gurus: I bought 100 units of Seagate 500GB SATA ST9500620NS IBM OEM from online merchant. They were system pulls drive with 90 day warranty. I found that 6 of them are not properly working. There were abnormal clicking sound once in a while. I requested for replacement/credit from the seller; initially, the seller refused to accept the return because he didn't believe that 6 out of 100 drives are defective. He was thinking defective rate should be < 2% or something. After long argument and told him that he shipped the drive in bubble-wrap, that could be the reason. Finally, he agreed for me to return the drives.

Seller received the drives and told me that he has to void the warranty because the drive has been tampered. He stated that the drive has not been tampered physically, but electronically. I asked him, why would / how could I tampered a drive electronically? He said the drive no longer has ID and the capacity has been clipped down to 4GB, therefore, it's tampered, beyond repair, and warranty is void.

I asked him what kind of tools/software he used to check the drive. He said he can't divulge the tools because it's confidential. It starts not making any sense for me. Long story short, I had another argument with the seller. Finally, seller agreed to post the screenshot. And it is SeaTools Enterprise, which is available for download from Seagate (I thought it was some proprietary tools).

The screenshot is attached, it does show that the capacity reported is 4GB / 4044MB. I am no techie, my question here is : what caused the drive showing 4GB capacity? Is it considered being tampered electronically, in such it voids the warranty?

Appreciate your comments on this.

No serial number shown either

Sounds to me like the drives are faulty, and he doesn't have a clue what he is doing.

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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I'm with Sean...seller is clueless.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Showing a small capacity like that is a clear sign of either firmware corruption, or more likely hardware failure. Definitely qualifies for RMA. Seller is clueless.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Either clueless or savvy.

Could be expecting buyer not to be so diligent and just ship forward so your client claims against you
Old open air market selling trick, sell enough good items in order to avoid call out on fraud, but mix enough bad in there to turn a better profit.
bag of eating apples, conceals majority cooking apples.
10x Xmas wrapper only has 8 in roll.
Huge zeppelin balloon for kids shown fully inflated with vendor, instruction to go home and soak in water for 2 hours. cheap copy explodes under minimal pressure.

generic: by the time the "error" is discovered the seller has moved on or is able to accuse you of con in return.

same sh^t : different wrapper - literally

Caveat Emptor -
but go for RMA anyway and ask whatever passes for Consumer Protection or Office of Fair Trading if you have one out there.

K

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Когда хочется кушать – съешь всё.
Голод не тётка!

It's a heaviely used drive...Power on time is 28135177,3 hours...In years that will give you: 3209 years , 7 month's , 1 day , 19 hours och 18 minutes
Something is clearly wrong.

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

I agree with the above lads. Showing 4GB (it's 3.86GB really) either means the firmware is toast or heads are damaged.

Tell the seller to return your money.

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Wonder what the failure rate will climb to once all sectors have been tested?