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. -- Regards, Giles Coochey, CCNP, CCNA, CCNAS NetSecSpec Ltd +44 (0) 8444 780677 +44 (0) 7983 877438 http://www.coochey.net http://www.netsecspec.co.uk giles at coochey.net