Basically, that can be translated into the seller of these OEM drives is the one that has to warranty them should anything go wrong with the drive as Seagate has nothing to do when drives are being parted out from enclosures and being sold onto the market.
We contacted Seagate and was told that drives being sold like this are covered under the warranty of the product that they were originally sold in and not as an individual drive.
We headed over to eBay and grabbed some of the serial numbers off the Seagate ST5000DM000 5TB drives being sold and found that the warranty status was unknown on every single one of the eight drives that clearly had the serial number visible in images on the listings. Why is this causing an issue for some consumers that unknowingly buy one of these drives? The two big issues is that the firmware of the drives is often designed and optimized for NAS or backup drive use and the drives do not carry a standard warranty on them.
The description states OEM but they look as if they took them out of some other device like an external USB backup enclosure that actually sells for less than the bare drive.įor example the Seagate Backup Plus 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive Enclosure has been priced at $129.99 at times and what some people are doing is taking that drive out of of the enclosure and reselling it for a profit as they are getting around $159 on sites like Amazon and eBay! This practice has been going on for a number of years with every brand storage drive out there and while most enthusiasts know about the practice it is relatively unknown to first time DIY consumers. Zero warranty from Seagate, only from the seller. From what we gather is that someone along the supply chain is pulling these Seagate 5TB drives are pulling these drives. When we looked closer at the listing we quickly discovered that the detailed description for the Seagate Barracuda ST5000DM000 5TB drive shows that it is an OEM bulk drive or that it is in OEM packaging. The companies that have sold this drive include known online retailers like Mwave and Rakuten, so these Seagate 5TB drives aren’t being sold by little unknown sellers. That is strange as we went over to Amazon and found half a dozen retailers selling this particular drive under the title of ‘Seagate Barracuda ST5000DM000 5TB 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive, SATA, 5900 Rpm, 128 Mb Buffer’. We looked into it and discovered that Seagate does not sell an internal 3.5-inch desktop drive on the market.
One of our readers asked us to look at the Seagate Barracuda ST5000DM000 5TB 3.5-inch internal desktop hard drive as he bought one off of Amazon and was having some performance issues with the drive.