Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage

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.

> 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.