Found recoverable files on brand new hard drive

[sanjusterr]

Hi. I just brought two new hard drives, Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB. However the packaging looked suspicious so I decided to see if there were any recoverable files on one of the drives. I did first have to initiate the drive and create a simple partition. Within the first partition of 3TB, I ran R-Studio 9.5.191520 and found there were 6579 documents of various types from Text files to Lotus organizer files, to various multimedia videos (MPEG, NEOchrome Animation, Shockwave, etc). The recovered files all did not play or open, returning error that the file types were not recognized (in players that should be able to play those formats). I'm really not too tech savvy. I'm just guessing that this is a used hard drive, branded as new. However wanted to check with folks if it possible that R-Studio is erroneously giving me all these recoverable files on a hard drive that is actually brand new?

Thanks!

[Alt]

This topic is on exactly the same matter:False positives with R-Studio?.

[sanjusterr]

Thanks so much!

[Alt]

Please pay especial attention to cryptocurrency mining! It can really kill the drive.

[sanjusterr]

I actually just ran CrystalDiskInfo on this drive, and strangely this shows the drive to be consistent with a new, unused drive, indicating power on hours as only 29 hours (I had left my computer running this long as I was scanning my drive with R-Studio overnight) and "Good" health status. As I said R-studio found thousands of documents of various formats as recoverable. I'm not sure how to reconcile this apparently conflicting data.

[Alt]

Crooks can alter this data. They'd have the disk cleaned up but that requires a lot of time.