Comment by rsync
6 hours ago
It's rough out there and has become increasingly difficult to maintain our pace of storage deployment.
Further - and most concerning - is the pollution of the supply chain with refurbished/recertified stock being sold and marketed as "new".
One example:
https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/
I strongly advise buyers to stick with trusted suppliers, avoid Amazon/ebay channels, and carefully vet your incoming stock with SMART tools to ensure you receive what you think you are ... especially for SSD parts.
DO NOT assume SMART is reliable. You can wipe SMART stats or write any values you want.
You have to actually examine the real bits on the drive. Resellers don't want to take the time to actually zero a drive, they usually just nuke the partition table.
You also need to physically examine the drive. Corroded fingerprints on the PCB, wear on the port contacts, scratches from mounting rails, etc.
That's how it found out that the last "new" drive I bought on Amazon was actually a used Backblaze drive. It contained terabytes of customer data, and a shit ton of cleartext files. SMART, of course, reported it was a brand new drive with zero hours. Cleartext logs on the drive showed many thousands of hours of runtime.
Physical examination is the only reliable method.
> That's how it found out that the last "new" drive I bought on Amazon was actually a used Backblaze drive. It contained terabytes of customer data, and a shit ton of cleartext files. SMART, of course, reported it was a brand new drive with zero hours. Cleartext logs on the drive showed many thousands of hours of runtime.
This sounds like it could be a big problem for Backblaze customers, and consequently for Backblaze.
Can you alert the Backblaze CEO about their insufficiently-decommissioned drives leaking out like this?
Backblaze customers also need to know, but I would give Backblaze the first shot at figuring out how to notify, whom, of what.
> drive I bought on Amazon was actually a used Backblaze drive
Assuming this is true, I find it weird/surprising that Backblaze doesn't at least zero their drives before disposing of them? I have to do that at my work, and at least by policy I could lose my job if I skipped doing it.
But you don’t work at backblaze :)
Question for all of you more knowledgeble than I: can SMART data be tampered with? When I get, say, a refurbished Mac from Apple, I'm trusting Apple won't stoop to that. But a SSD vendor I've never heard of?
Yes. There are vendor-specific utilities that have escaped into the wild that allow bad actors to reset various SMART counters, etc.
A lot of abuse came to light during the launch and initial mining of the (ridiculous) Chiacoin[1] during which Chia miners would burn through SSDs to within a hair of their usable life, reset their SMART stats, and sell them as new on Amazon or ebay.
As can be seen in my above comment, larger distributors like "Maestro Technologies" have their stock polluted with parts like this and I find it very unlikely that they are not aware of the status of these parts they are selling as new.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network
Yes, it can be tampered with. Drives can even lie about the amount of storage they support. I once bought a 1TB pen drive that was only 32MB for $10. (Yes, I knew it was a scam beforehand.)
Nearly any product you can buy from Amazon, even when it says shipped from Amazon, is suspect.
I wouldn't shop there at all. It's a literal scam market. Allegedly.