Fake hard drives

[conroy11]

There has been messages about fake hard drives being sold on Ebay for several years and Ebay is doing nothing about it. I urge every body who has been duped by these drives to make a complaint. It appears all Ebay is interested in is making money, not looking after members.

[sugar249]

What do you propose Ebay do about it,  personally go and check every hard drive.

There are fakes sold of heaps of products on all Platforms and Bricks and Mortar.

Not saying it is right,  but offer a viable solution instead of just saying Ebay needs to fix it.

[imastawka]

Ebay has the Money Back Guarantee.

If it doesn't match the description, the buyer opens a case for Item Not as Described and gets their money refunded.

What more do you want ebay to do?

[davewil1964]

Let me guess -

They are from foreign sellers;

They are significantly cheaper than real drives from reputable Australian sellers.

Generally you get what you pay for.

Caveat emptor

[pjs04]

I recently saw a couple of sellers offering cheap Seagate Basic portable hard drives in capacities 2TB, 4TB and 5TB with prices ranging from about $45 to $55 Australian. I decided to purchase a couple of the 5TB hard drives. They took nearly 2 weeks to arrive.

What I received is a couple of what look like Seagate Backup Plus Slim drive boxes with two "drives" that look like Backup Plus Slim drives. I had ordered 5TB drives but the ones I received are in slim housing (about 12mm tall) that Seagate only used for capacities up to 2TB; with Seagate's actual 4TB and 5TB drives being about 20mm tall. The external boxes look vaguely legitimate, but neither the boxes nor the drives have Seagate's usual drive labels listing model and serial number details.

When connected to my Windows PC, a window opens for a drive labelled "Seagate" with 4.76TB free. Using Hard Disk Sentinel software the drive identifies itself as a "SDK SSD" with capacity of 4882.8GB. All my real 5TB Seagate drives are "ST5000LM000-xxxxxx" (where xxxxxx is a 6 character ID string) that have a capacity of 4657.4GB. Notably the drives don't exhibit any vibration typical of a spinning hard drive, and mount in Windows about 2 seconds after being connected.

This is what one of the drive looks like from the top:

I popped the lid off one of the drives and this is what I saw:

Basically there is a micro-SD card reader, glued in place at the USB Port end of the case,  with one micro-SD card fitted, and a lump of metal for added weight held in place with double-sided mounting tape. Here's a view of the label side of the micro-SD card once taken out of the reader:

I put the micro-SD card in my own reader and the drive again came up as the same "SDK    SSD" with capacity of 4882.8GB. It seems the card has firmware that identifies at as having severely exagerated capacity. I've yet to run additional tests so I'm not sure of the actual drive capacity, but I'm pretty certain the drive will start to overwrite itself once the real capacity is exhausted. A quick Google search of the large number printed on the card gave no results, but the "128" suggests a possible real capacity of as much as 128GB; which is a decent amount for a casual user to write to the drive as a test.

[countessalmirena]

The price should have alerted you.

Open a SNAD dispute (Significantly Not As Described). Just state that they are not as described and don't have the stated capacity. Don't go into extensive detail: just the minimum fact. Don't mention that it's not a genuine Seagate product unless you have a statement on letterhead from the actual company. Seller must provide return postage label or other way of returning the items - and if seller doesn't provide this, you need to escalate the dispute when this option becomes available.

Can you post the item number here? (You can't mention the seller's name, but item number is fine.)

[davewil1964]

So you bought what you knew were fakes, given the price.

What is your question/complaint?

Seagate don't do budget basic afaik

[sugar249]

Can hardly open an item not as described case,  they have opened it. has to be returned in original condition.   They knowingly knew they were fakes.   

[pjs04]

Yes I fully expected the drives I purchased to be fake, but you always hope for a bargain arising from some distributor's fire sale.

A Best Match search for "Seagate 5TB" gave me about 10 listings with drive prices that would suggest the drives are fake. Some are supposedly by domestic sellers while other are from sellers in China.  All are using stock advertising images, but there appear to be no images showing higher profile 4TB and 5TB drive images.

As an example item 186099264717 offers Seagate USB 3.0 portable drives ranging from 1TB for $42.99, up to 5TB for $49.99.

There's no obvious way for a casual buyer to know which drives are real. And lots of sellers offering drives at similar price points might lead buyers to think these prices are now legitimately "in the ballpark".

[countessalmirena]

In that case… it really means that you’re not buying in good faith.

A buyer who bases their idea of what’s reasonable in price for a genuine item cannot possibly do so by looking on eBay and going for the mean or the average or most prevalent. They’ve really got to look for the RRP - which is around 4 times higher… or 3 times higher on sale at the moment with a quick look on an authorised Australian seller’s website.

I’ve said this so many times, because it seems to me that quite a few buyers still think eBay is a magical place of true bargains where somehow genuine items for some reason or other can be had without any markup or middleman or the costs associated with a genuine dealer having to pay staff/rent/GST, etc… or indeed well below the actual cost price.

It just isn't! This pretty fantasy is a marketing story used consciously by purveyors of fakes with either brand name or left unbranded.

Buy unrealistically cheap, get garbage. This is why we’re inundated with Chinese listings on eBay Australia. Australians have a reputation as prize chumps… embarrassing.