Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by mschuster91 on Saturday August 16, 2025 @09:13AM (#44923115)

> Seagate suspects that the used hard drives originated from China during the Chia boom. Following the cryptocurrency's downfall, numerous miners sold these used drives to workshops where many were illicitly repurposed to appear new. This bust may represent only the tip of the iceberg, as Heise estimates that at least one million of these Chia drives are circulating, although the exact number that have been recycled remains uncertain.

Chia? That was early Covid. I'm surprised that it took so long for the poor abused drives to re-enter the supply chains.

And for the record: fuck cryptocurrencies. All of them. So much wasted hardware, all for nothing in the end.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by protimewaster on Saturday August 16, 2025 @09:24AM (#44923203)

The excitement with Chia was really something else. It was supposed to be the "green" crypto, because crypto is in a bad enough state that "buying exabytes of hard drives" is considered the green approach.

I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by ndriscoll on Saturday August 16, 2025 @11:16AM (#44924188)

You can get refurb drives for $10/TB, so if you had cheap electricity or excess solar or something and somehow had the network connection to receive that data in a reasonable time, that's over a 10% annual "dividend yield". Not bad at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by HPsquared on Saturday August 16, 2025 @11:25AM (#44924257)

There are probably better ways to many money from cheap electricity.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by pessimizer on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:09PM (#44925672)

You'd have to calculate this in drive-hours for it to make sense at all. Those drives won't last long enough to pay for themselves at that rate, even assuming that the per TB return on this failing cryptocurrency that you hear nothing about remains steady for a decade.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by gruez on Saturday August 16, 2025 @09:32AM (#44923258)

>I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?

Mining profits always trends towards zero. To make actual money (or any at all), you need massive economies of scale, lean operations, and advantages compared to your competitor (eg. cheap source of HDDs or electricity).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by diggan on Saturday August 16, 2025 @01:50PM (#44925506)

> Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?

I'm guessing the $26/month figure you've calculated is based on the current price of something? I'm also guessing whoever is doing that right now, has calculated that the price would move in a particular direction, maybe then it makes more sense (in their mind).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by dgfitz on Saturday August 16, 2025 @01:40PM (#44925428)

> And for the record: fuck cryptocurrencies. All of them. So much wasted hardware, all for nothing in the end.

I must be the only dummy that sees the parallels between crypto, NFTs, and LLMs…

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by pessimizer on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:12PM (#44925689)

If you think this, it is evidence that you are not at all familiar with any of these subjects. People say this thousands of times a day across any threads about any of them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by dgfitz on Saturday August 16, 2025 @05:27PM (#44927048)

Sure thing.

I read this site a lot, I don’t see this said often, at all.

Got links? 50 or so would prove your point.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop by Ukv on Saturday August 16, 2025 @04:27PM (#44926653)

Feels unfortunate that their proof-of-space is just (to my understanding) random data. Would've thought that proof-of-space might be more amenable to having the proof be actually useful, since you can check the right data was returned with a hash (whereas only some computation-based tasks are verifiable) and data can be encrypted (whereas only limited computation can be done with homomorphic encryption).

[ Parent | on HN ]