The scourge of counterfeit hard drives is showing no signs of stopping. After reports of hard drives used for Chia cryptocurrency mining being sold as new came out, Seagate recently seized around 700 counterfeit hard drives in Malaysia. Counterfeiters are using intricate methods to pass off used desktop drives from Seagate, WD, and Toshiba as high-capacity surveillance drives. With fake drives permeating all sales channels, here's what you can do to protect yourself.

Avoid deals that are too good to be true

And always buy from trusted sites

The easiest thing you can do to avoid counterfeit drives is avoid listings that seem unusually enticing. If a 20TB Seagate IronWolf drive costs around $350 on Amazon, you can be sure that that $200 listing on a random marketplace is fishy. This is what was going on with the counterfeit drives seized in Malaysia. Sites like Lazada and Shopee were being used to sell used hard drives as new ones using cheap listings.

It might be best to stick to authorized sellers and reliable websites when buying all your hard drives. This might not be an airtight solution to a complicated problem, since even trusted partners have inadvertently sold counterfeit drives. The supply chain has been compromised, but you can at least minimize the chances of being scammed by buying only from trusted sellers instead of relatively unknown platforms.

Inspect the packaging

Look for the original sticker and production date

Let's say you've bought a new (supposedly) hard drive from Amazon or other trusted retailers. You should still inspect it for signs of counterfeiting. It might be a basic check, but you might be "lucky" and find that your drive packaging has the original manufacturer sticker missing, or the serial number fails the verification check on the manufacturer's website.

The other thing you can do is check the manufacturing date on the box. If it's over 6 months older than when you bought it, chances are that it's a counterfeit drive. Genuine new hard drives usually make it into consumers' hands a few months after production. If the one you bought has a pretty old manufacturing date, there might be some tampering going on.

Compare S.M.A.R.T. and FARM logs

Not a fool-proof method anymore

While consumers used to rely on a drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to check parameters like power-on hours, counterfeiters have long been able to manipulate that data. Seagate's proprietary FARM logs, which you can access using SeaTools, can be compared to the S.M.A.R.T. logs to check if a drive is counterfeit. If there's a significant discrepancy between the two, you can be sure the drive is fake.

While this method works only for Seagate drives, there's a far worse limitation. Counterfeiters can now tamper with the FARM logs, too, making the entire exercise mostly pointless. It might have become harder to spot a counterfeit drive, but as a consumer, you need to do what you can. Seagate and other manufacturers are working on providing consumers with more tools to identify fake drives, but until then, caution is your best ally.

Confirm drive capacity with ValiDrive

Many counterfeits are falsely sold as having larger capacities

Inadvertently buying a drive that's been used for thousands of hours isn't the only thing you need to be wary of. Counterfeiters also routinely pass off smaller drives as having a much higher capacity. The drives report the advertised capacity in tools like CrystalDiskInfo since the scammers can easily fake the firmware. And copying a few GBs of data to the drive doesn't raise alarms, since you can see that data in File Explorer.

What you can do instead is use ValiDrive to run a spot-check on the drive. The tool picks random sectors to write and read data, which can easily uncover a drive that has a far lower capacity than advertised. ValiDrive chooses sectors across the entire reported capacity of the drive, so it's almost guaranteed to uncover a 4TB drive posing as an 18TB one.

Counterfeit drives are getting harder to spot

It's unfortunate that buying a genuine hard drive has become an obstacle course. Counterfeiters have managed to replace drive labels, packaging, S.M.A.R.T data, and even proprietary logs. What you can still do to protect yourself is stick to trusted and authorized sellers, avoid listings that are unusually cheap, check the packaging for obvious signs of tampering, and inspect the drive's power-on parameters to spot a counterfeit drive.