Question "Hardware reset" ?

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Eliticus

May 11, 2025
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What would cause this?

I'm asking because I bought what should be a new 16TB internal Enterprise drive. I installed it and then immediately checked the stats. Everything seemed like what it should be, except the drive had one hardware reset. Would that reset the stats of the drive, hours used, data read/written, etc making a used drive appear to be new?

Because I found it very suspicious this "new" drive didn't have a manufacturer's label, only the back label showing a 2021(!) manufacturer date. And Toshiba showed the warranty as though it were counting from that time plus about two weeks, meaning the 5 year warranty will expire exactly 18 months from the date of delivery.

I haven't noticed any other problems with it, but I also didn't use it after realizing I might not have gotten what I paid for.
 
These drives are expensive. Obviously a scammer. Lots of those today. See if you can return the HDD and get a refund from the seller asap. All Drives have the manufacturers name and specifications of the drive and Date it was made. I hope you can get your money back. Brand New HDD's need to be partitioned and formatted for use with the OS. Maybe they updated the firmware of the drive and erased it before selling it. You should make an inquiry with the seller.
 
Define expensive. How much should it have cost? It is a Toshiba 16 TB Enterprise HDD SATA MG08ACA16TE. The back label shows the correct stats, along with a serial number for a drive with 15 months warranty left and a 2021 manufacturer date. But the label saying Toshiba hard drive Enterprise Capacity 16 TB MG series is not present.

Is it possible the 1 hardware reset was them resetting the proverbial odometer, or did they really leave a new drive sitting on the shelf for 45 months before loading it once, packaging it in something that doesn't look official, then selling it?
There are other recent complaints this seller gave them the wrong item (used items sold as new, broken items sold as working, etc)..
 
Eliticus said:
What would cause this?
Asking because I bought what should be a new 16 TB internal Enterprise drive. I installed it and then immediately checked the stats. Everything seemed like what it should be, except the drive had one hardware reset. Would that reset the stats of the drive, hours used, data read/written, etc making a used drive appear new? Because I found it very suspicious this "new" drive didn't have a manufacturer's label, only the back label showing a 2021(!) manufacturer date. And Toshiba showed the warranty as though it were counting from that time plus about two weeks, meaning the 5 year warranty will expire exactly 18 months from the date of delivery.

I haven't noticed any other problems with it, but I also didn't use it after realizing I might not have gotten what I paid for.
Click to expand...
Bought from where?

Link, if you can.
 
Eliticus said:
https://www.newegg.com/toshiba-mg08aca16te-16tb/p/1Z4-000B-00FR7?Item=9SIBMM4K4U1663
The first listing.
Click to expand...
Shipped and Sold by....random people
qvcg61r.png


No manufacturers label?

If you go to Toshiba, and attempt to check the warranty status...what happens?
 
Yeah, I don't see it for sale either directly from newegg or from toshiba.
As I mentioned, the warranty shows exactly 18 months counting from yesterday. Which does fit with the july 2021 manufacturer date.
 
USAFRet said:
You bought was was supposed to be a "new" drive.
Yet a lot of the warranty is already used up.

So...not new.
Click to expand...
Could still be physically new, if Toshiba simply counts from the manufacturing date if you aren't buying from a "certified" reseller (or something like that) and providing a receipt. Many manufacturers will default to the manufacturing date if there is no original receipt from a legitimate seller. If some rando was the original purchaser for like 300 drives and then sold them on a year later, Toshiba wouldn't be providing the warranty to you based on the rando's purchase date OR the date you bought one from the rando. Or maybe two weeks after manufacture is the date they recorded them sold directly from Toshiba to a legitimate seller, which this random seller bought them from recently. The likelihood that they've been sitting around for 4.5 years unused is low, but it's possible they just got a cheap buy on some old inventory of bulk drives.

Provide images of the drive itself, and the SMART values. I've never seen an HDD that had more than one label (on the metal top plate) so I don't know what "back" label you might be referring to. Every image I see on other sites looks exactly like the ones on Newegg's listing, a very simple black and white label with printing that doesn't even cover the whole plate, with no logo. (The other images with Toshiba Hard Drive Enterprise Capacity, etc. are just marketing images.)

The "hardware reset" counter does not seem to indicate much other than that the drive received a reset command from the PC. It doesn't even seem to be a stat that is included with all drives. But, if they did reset all the SMART counters, then a reset could have been the final step in the process, recorded after the wipe occurred. Is the drive perfectly clean and unmarked?

https://superuser.com/questions/180...e-is-nearing-end-of-life-while-crystaldiskinf
 
USAFRet said:
Here is a slightly larger (18TB vs 16TB), Sold and Shipped directly by Newegg.
But significantly higher price.

https://www.newegg.com/toshiba-mg09-series-hdepz10gea51-18tb/p/N82E16822149799
Click to expand...
Technically also a generation newer, and uses new "Flux Control Microwave-assisted Magnetic Recording" so they're not exactly directly comparable. The price is still a good bit lower than sellers on other sites listing "new" drives, but not half the price.
 
Anybody that's a reseller on a marketplace like Amazon, Newegg, whatever, is a random. But they could be a perfectly legitimate one, like going to a local PC shop in your town, or they could be a fly-by-night operation churning out fake parts or selling used parts as new (or doing it for a long time simply because the big sites won't shut them down). It's pretty much impossible to really know other than by looking at the ratings/reviews and hoping that they haven't been faked or cheated, like by changing the listings so they're no longer for the product being sold. Platinum Micro has quite a few really awful ones, a lot of great ones, and very little in between. (A lot of the 1-star reviews, a ridiculous number, were due to Amazon screwing up, though, not the seller, but it's a steady flow. But where the seller did respond, they didn't say whether it was resolved in any positive way. Just a generic response.)

Is there a reason you're only focusing on these Toshiba drives, which don't seem to be available from the big sellers directly? Why not a WD or Seagate which are more widely available? These are from roughly the same release years. (Newer models cost a lot more.)

https://www.newegg.com/gold-wd161kr...822234421?Item=N82E16822234421&SoldByNewegg=1
 
evermorex76 said:
Anybody that's a reseller on a marketplace like Amazon, Newegg, whatever, is a random. But they could be a perfectly legitimate one, like going to a local PC shop in your town, or they could be a fly-by-night operation churning out fake parts or selling used parts as new (or doing it for a long time simply because the big sites won't shut them down). It's pretty much impossible to really know other than by looking at the ratings/reviews and hoping that they haven't been faked or cheated, like by changing the listings so they're no longer for the product being sold. Platinum Micro has quite a few really awful ones, a lot of great ones, and very little in between. (A lot of the 1-star reviews, a ridiculous number, were due to Amazon screwing up, though, not the seller, but it's a steady flow. But where the seller did respond, they didn't say whether it was resolved in any positive way. Just a generic response.)

Is there a reason you're only focusing on these Toshiba drives, which don't seem to be available from the big sellers directly? Why not a WD or Seagate which are more widely available? These are from roughly the same release years. (Newer models cost a lot more.)

https://www.newegg.com/gold-wd161kr...822234421?Item=N82E16822234421&SoldByNewegg=1
Click to expand...
I wanted a large drive, 16 TB or greater, and highly reliable. I focused on Toshiba because nearly all the others had frequent drive failure complaints even though, judging by the specs they shouldn't be failing, especially not when you are using an enterprise drive as a consumer drive. I remember hearing about a LOT of Seagate failures, but it was also > 5 years ago that I was creating my past build and maybe their new models are better.
It also almost seems like platinum micro is a big seller. Not quite as big as amazon/newegg, but they have a presence both directly and indirectly.
 
Just about all the mentions of them online are their own site and their listings on sites like Amazon, Newegg, Walmart, etc., plus complaints on forums about how terrible they are. Many of the complaints also seem to be about them selling gray market/OEM drives that aren't covered by the manufacturer warranties but Platinum also won't warranty them, or were not new when listed as new, or dead drives and other parts, etc. And there is Reseller Ratings' 2.23/5 rank. https://www.resellerratings.com/store/Platinum_Micro

Toshiba has a MUCH smaller share of the market than Seagate or WD, so they'll automatically have fewer reports of problems in terms of absolute numbers, but they also aren't the best relative to the number in use. You can see by the simple fact that they're not easily available from major sellers that they are not as popular, though they may sell better in some regions like Japan. Seagate definitely has the worst reliability percentage-wise, and their prices are lower to make up for it, but Toshiba is actually far behind WD overall. You can check the Backblaze drive stats for each year. Unfortunately they don't use a lot of WD drives so the sample size is low.

Remember of course, you're putting all your eggs into one very big basket.
 
evermorex76 said:
Just about all the mentions of them online are their own site and their listings on sites like Amazon, Newegg, Walmart, etc., plus complaints on forums about how terrible they are. Many of the complaints also seem to be about them selling gray market/OEM drives that aren't covered by the manufacturer warranties but Platinum also won't warranty them, or were not new when listed as new, or dead drives and other parts, etc. And there is Reseller Ratings' 2.23/5 rank. https://www.resellerratings.com/store/Platinum_Micro

Toshiba has a MUCH smaller share of the market than Seagate or WD, so they'll automatically have fewer reports of problems in terms of absolute numbers, but they also aren't the best relative to the number in use. You can see by the simple fact that they're not easily available from major sellers that they are not as popular, though they may sell better in some regions like Japan. Seagate definitely has the worst reliability percentage-wise, and their prices are lower to make up for it, but Toshiba is actually far behind WD overall. You can check the Backblaze drive stats for each year. Unfortunately they don't use a lot of WD drives so the sample size is low.

Remember of course, you're putting all your eggs into one very big basket.
Click to expand...
Hm. Noted.
On a hunch, I pointed a file recovery program at the drive. It didn't find anything, and deep scan will take a full day. That will at least confirm whether it was a used drive fraudulently sold as new, or they really did leave it sitting on a shelf for 3.5 years before I bought it.
Also, I assumed the drive I had might be grey market/OEM because it didn't have that Toshiba label on it but someone said that's just marketing and it's normal that drives not have that.
What is the most reliable - WD or something else?
 
Eliticus said:
On a hunch, I pointed a file recovery program at the drive. It didn't find anything, and deep scan will take a full day. That will at least confirm whether it was a used drive fraudulently sold as new, or they really did leave it sitting on a shelf for 3.5 years before I bought it.
Click to expand...
If they wrote all zeroes before resetting SMART (which they would have done if they had any brains), the scan won't find anything at all. Seagate drives have a special storage area that records data that doesn't get wiped when SMART is reset, so it's possible to read that to verify the power-on hours, but apparently other brands don't have any way to tell.

I'm the one that mentioned the labeling, but as I said, I've never seen a drive that had two labels in the first place (where would a second one go?). I can't even find any actual images of retail packaging for the enterprise Toshiba drives, and even their own site just shows that plain label on their page for the MG10/11. They do seem to have started using a colored stripe on retail drives to indicate the class, Surveillance, NAS, etc., but I'm not sure there is a retail enterprise version. You can't buy them from Toshiba directly (except in volume by calling their sales department), so I'm not sure there actually is a difference between OEM or retail with them.

There's really only three HDD manufacturers now. Toshiba, Seagate and WD. Everybody else is small brands just rebadging the others and claiming they're "specially certified", or they're refurbishing them or getting B-stock and rebadging them. Hitachi storage was sold to WD, but Toshiba also got some of their tech. Seagate has the largest market share because they're the cheapest and OEMs are happy to cut corners to save a few pennies, because the RMAs cost them less than what they saved (or at least comes from a different budget and appears on a different Powerpoint slide so it lets their sales continue to look good even if a lot of them need replacement), and of course consumers just see price mainly.

WD is the most reliable of the three, although sometimes even they might have a model that is a dud (it just happens less often). With WD, at least in enterprise/datacenter drives, you're looking at much less than 1% failure rates on average. With Toshiba, like 1.5. With Seagate it's 2 or above. Anecdotally, Seagate does seem to have the same lower reliability in consumer drives, on average. Seagate may produce one or two models that have amazing reliability, but then they'll make one that is just atrocious, and with the majority of them just being in a wide "pretty bad" category. WD is consistently "really good", even if they have had one or two "pretty bad" models; they just don't release anything atrocious. Toshiba seems to be consistent within a wide "fairly good" category. I've also been happy with WD's RMA process in the past, a little more than with Seagate's, but I've never used Toshiba's.

If you're using a single drive to store your data, you'd want WD (even if you're backing it up somewhere, simply to avoid the hassle of a failure and having to restore data). If you're using multiple drives in RAID, you can go with Toshiba or Seagate, depending on how tolerable a failure would be. If it's just RAID1 with two drives, Seagate is fine because everything will still work exactly the same if one fails. If it's a RAID5/6 array with any number of drives you'd want to consider spending more to avoid a failure because of the performance degradation of a failure in RAID5/6, and a rebuild is also very intense so perhaps could cause another failure. RAID10 with 4+ drives would also work with Seagate as there's no performance loss with a failure, and rebuilds aren't bad. RAID50/60 aren't as bad as 5/6.
 
Oh, I'm not making a full on datacenter server. I'm just going for:
One max speed M2.
One lower speed M2.
Big mechanical drive for large files.
And I am mainly concerned about failures from the hardware aspect than the software aspect, since return policies are becoming a bit more strict.
 
Eliticus said:
Oh, I'm not making a full on datacenter server. I'm just going for:
One max speed M2.
One lower speed M2.
Big mechanical drive for large files.
And I am mainly concerned about failures from the hardware aspect than the software aspect, since return policies are becoming a bit more strict.
Click to expand...
What is your plan for backing up such a large amount of data?
 
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