Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Hi there,

I have a new hard drive bought from a seller who had one bit of negative feedback claiming a used drive had been sold as new and its S.M.A.R.T. data had been reset. The drive I received looks spotless and the bag was sealed (but bag sealers are easy to buy, of course...)

I decided to film while I unboxed and scanned the drive using R-Studio. While there were no concrete partitions found, R-Studio is showing several kinds of files, mostly an antiquated video format (.VP6).

My first thought was that this HDD had been used in a CCTV system. However, none of the detected files I've recovered from the drive have worked at all (.TXT .MPG .VP6) Even the detected .TXT files were very short and filled with gibberish.

Is R-Studio known to give produce positives for its searches? I have definitely used R-Studio to successfully recover files decades ago before I kept proper backups, but I've never before scanned a brand new drive.

Bonus question - Is there any other kind of test I can perform on this drive to ascertain if it's been used or not?

All the best,
Dax.

Here are a couple screenshots. Note the pattern in the recovery graph.

daxliniere wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 18, 2025 9:36 am

I decided to film while I unboxed and scanned the drive using R-Studio. While there were no concrete partitions found, R-Studio is showing several kinds of files, mostly an antiquated video format (.VP6).

My first thought was that this HDD had been used in a CCTV system. However, none of the detected files I've recovered from the drive have worked at all (.TXT .MPG .VP6) Even the detected .TXT files were very short and filled with gibberish.

Most likely this drive was used in cryptocurrency mining.

daxliniere wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 18, 2025 9:36 am

Is R-Studio known to give produce positives for its searches? I have definitely used R-Studio to successfully recover files decades ago before I kept proper backups, but I've never before scanned a brand new drive.

It does produce positives. This article File Recovery Basics: How Data Recovery Works explains why.

daxliniere wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 18, 2025 9:36 am

Is there any other kind of test I can perform on this drive to ascertain if it's been used or not?

A brand new disk contains nothing but zeros.

Hi @Alt,
Thank you so much for your responses, it was good to learn more about that and was ultimately helpful in getting an Amazon return and, with any luck, shutting down the scam seller.

All the best,
Dax.

daxliniere wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 23, 2025 6:08 pm

was ultimately helpful in getting an Amazon return and, with any luck, shutting down the scam seller.

That's good. I forgot to tell you that mining wears drives out almost up to their death.

R-TT - Number 1 in saving people's asses.