Has your ‘new’ device been used before?
Did your new hard drive, laptop or phone have a previous owner? Robert Irvine explains how to check for giveaway signs it’s not as new as the seller claimed
Buying a refurbished device saves you money and helps the environment. But when you purchase a brand new product, you naturally assume it’s never been used before and will therefore offer optimum performance.
Sadly, this isn’t always the case. Earlier this year, German tech-news site Heise.de reported that more than 250 of its readers had purchased Seagate hard drives that were supposedly new but had, in fact, been used previously – potentially for tens of thousands of hours over up to three years (www.snipca.com/54520).
Further investigation found hundreds of drives were being sold by retailers and in online marketplaces all over the world, including by some official Seagate partners.
Although such occurrences are rare, there’s still a risk that a ‘new’ item you buy online, particularly from a third-party seller, had a previous life. Here, we explain how to check if your devices have been used before, so you can claim a refund from the retailer if that’s the case.
With SSDs, SMART can also tell you the amount of data that’s been written to and read from the drive, and the percentage of their projected lifespan that’s remaining. On a new hard drive or SSD, you’d expect all usage values to be near zero and the lifespan figure to be 100 per cent.