Comment by beala

Seagate has a proprietary version of SMART called FARM. It’s supposed to be more tamper resistant than SMART, but it appears the fraudsters have figured out how to manipulate it too [1].

The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the serial number against the manufacturers database if available is also a good precaution.

These are probably things you should be doing whether or not the drive is allegedly new.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Larger-disks-wi...