Comment by estimator7292
4 hours ago
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 :)