Help please: Exos X18 new arrived with Manufacturing date 12/21

[LST]

Hello,
I would greatly appreciate your help.
I ordered 6 X18 HDDs at the best price available online at the time.
On arrival I inspected and realized the manufacturing date is December 2021. Is this normal or should I be suspicious?
Can you point me to some software tools I can use to detect if the disks are not genuinely new?
Thanks and best regards,
LST

 

[i386]

The manufacturing date is okay (x18 is not the newest generation).
You can check the warranty on seagates website (Warranty & Replacements | Support Seagate US), genuine exos hdd serial numbers will tell you when the warranty started (up to -1 month of the purchase, the official distributors register them at seagate before sending them to stores/retailers)

 

[Tech Junky]

Normal. Dates don't mean much other than when it was produced. Seagate should have a SN lookup that will verify things. If you want you can additionally match the printed SN with the electronic version using something like CDM to read the smart data.

 

[LST]

Thank you for your help.
There is something suspicious as Seagate recognizes the drive but doesn't let me see the warranty.
I'll have to speak to Seagate and the vendor.
Thanks.

 

[i386]

Thank you for your help.
There is something suspicious as Seagate recognizes the drive but doesn't let me see the warranty.
I'll have to speak to Seagate and the vendor.
Thanks.

Sounds like you got oem hdds.*
Happened tot me to when I tried to get more exos x16 16tb hdds for my fileserver. I had a ticket opened with seagate support via the chat bot but at some point they stopped replying and it went nowhere...

*OEMs get them for almost half the price but they should offer customer support, firmware updatess etc. Some oems/distributors sell them to retailers/online stores and get that way more money than selling a whole system...

 

[LST]

Looks like that's what happened. Thanks.
Didn't get them half the price, just a few euros less. So all in not a great deal.

 

[i386]

Didn't get them half the price, just a few euros less. So all in not a great deal.

You will pay the normal price, but the retailers & distributors get a bigger margin than with hdds destined for end customers.
One of the reasons why I returned all the oem drives and contacted seagate.