There’s a great deal on a drive from Amazon Warehouse, but I’m a bit concerned about the quality of the drive and the fact I can’t return it.
Anybody have any experience buying something like this?
There’s a great deal on a drive from Amazon Warehouse, but I’m a bit concerned about the quality of the drive and the fact I can’t return it.
Anybody have any experience buying something like this?
My guess would be that it’s stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD’s firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.
I haven’t seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.
I’ve bought used / refurbished (not sure which) with erased smart data. It being all zeros was a clear sign of erased / tampered info. After running badblocks some relocated sectors showed up.