Is there a way to hide hard drive history/info?

B0bbyEwing

I bought a 2nd hand hard drive from hard-drive-experts on ebay. 4TB for about £60. Nothing important going on it so was happy to take the gamble.

Ran hard disk sentinel…

On the face of it it appears to have never been used. Is that likely or is there a way of 'winding back the clock' so that it appears this way but in reality it's been in continuous use for 10yrs straight?

Exodi

Sounds like a good deal, would love that for my NAS setup!

AFAIK there's no way to alter the start/stop count.

flaneurs_lobster

Are you saying that it just looks too good? Think someone's clocked it?

If it had been in use for ten years then I suppose you'd expect a few dodgy sectors on a spinny disk.

Probably are tools out there to hack whatever the metadata of hard drives is called, but wouldn't a decent diagnostic program see round this?

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81954823#Comment_81954823

That's what I thought but I'm pretty ignorant to this & don't know what wizardry can be done.

I bought another hard drive from another seller & it'd only been in use for a few hours apparently. Barely any cycles. Maybe I've just been extremely lucky twice in that I've managed to bag a genuinely barely used drive.

Boohoo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81954831#Comment_81954831

Is this a Seagate drive?

I thought there was a way on their website to check the serial number for the hard drives.

Maybe the hard drive manufacturer has software or similar to reset the drives before selling them on. Not saying this is what may have happened to your drive.

What is the name of the firm you got the drive from?

JSmithy45AD

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81954896#Comment_81954896

I suspect it may be "hard-drive-experts on ebay" but I may be wrong ;)

Vitor

It's not just the risk of 'clocking', it could easily be a 500GB that reports as 4TB, as they do with dodgy USB sticks

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81954995#Comment_81954995

How would you know for 100?% sure?

Yes Seagate & JSmithy is indeed correct.

spud17

There used to be a program called Victoria which, IIRC could reset a hard drive's 'history'.

I'm replying from memory, so don't me.

Undervalued

Could it in fact be brand new but a grey import not intended for the UK?

Years ago this used to be quite common with some higher end camera equipment. Some firms would buy in bulk overseas rather than from the approved UK agent. It would then be advertised as second hand but mint condition and / or unboxed and therefore without a UK manufacturer's warranty.

Boohoo

I was researching this issue yesterday and there was a Reddit thread about the same thing and it said if you use FARM program from Seagate it will show the history as that can't be altered.

Not sure if I am giving the correct name as I haven't included a link.