On 07/10/2013 19:28, John R Pierce wrote:
On 10/7/2013 5:59 AM, Eliezer Croitoru wrote:
I am still wating for WD or SEAGATE representetive of them to describe for me the details of how a how a drive was made from 0 to 100.
I'm sure they both consider that information trade secret.
its my understanding that testing done on the factory floor leaves the counters cleared when the final firmware is installed. Ditto factory 'remanufactured' aka 'refurbished' drives that are tested, and relabeled, they get cleared after test. last one of these I got, sold as such, had a different colored label (green instead of silver) and clearly said remanufactured, I'm pretty sure its SMART data was also reset. What the OP got appears to be a drive that was returned, retested and resold somewhere in the distributor-retailer train, NOT by the factory, hence what people refer to as 'grey market'.
I've replaced a number of Seagate 1TB SAS drives, constellations I think, and at least 2 of the 3 replacements I've done were with drives that were clearly marked as for RMA REPLACEMENT ONLY, which I assume are previously 'failed' drives that have gone back, been re-assessed / re-furbished and put back into the market. I don't know much about SMART, but I get the impression that the drives decide to fail themselves when some metric goes anomalous, rather than continue running and potentially cause data corruption. Therefore there's likely to be a large number of drives that can be tweaked to go back into production after they have 'failed' If I buy a drive from a retailer, then I expect a factory 'new' one though, hence my request for the manufacturer and retailer to be named by the OP.