I have bought a Hitachi UltraStar 7K3000, a 3 TB internal drive. It was sold not in the box but in some kind of plastic parcel that was closed. Manufactured in Thailand, March 2012 - so it's 6 years old.
How can I check the health of it and if it was used and refurbished?
What I have done before asked the question:
CrystalDiskInfo shows it's new and unused (zero/low values). Can this program deliver wrong information?
Windows 7 chkdsk: also okay.
The most reliable way is to look at the SMART values, using whatever tool you prefer for your platform. SMART values include Power_On_Hours, which should tell you if the disk is used or not. It will also tell you a lot about the health of the disk.
Tinkering with the SMART values is not impossible, but difficult, and needs insider knowledge about the harddisk controller, which usual means working at the company that produces those harddisks.
Any company being able to tinker with those values will also be able to remove any other traces of refurbishing. So in that case, it's pretty hopeless, but such an amount of energy is usually not spent to dupe customers.
I don't know what kind of information CrystalDiskInfo shows, and you didn't tell us in the question, so I can't comment on that.
You could also try to use forensic tools on the harddisk, to reveal if there was any content on it . Something like sleuthkit or the testdisk tool seems like a good place to start. (Edit: I meant the testdisk not the file tool, sorry)
Some of these comments are wrong. It's 2023, from what I read in customer hard drive reviews for Amazon, sellers are able to reset the hours count back to zero even when there are damages to the outer hard drive meaning it's used. Some are reporting suspiciously low hours on the drive. The most alarming evidence is how many of the reviews report drives failing after a few months or even DOA. They are sending them out in antistatic bags, and most being sold are server pulls.
You have to do extended SMART tests on them and keep them powered on for 24 hours to weed out obvious failures. And bad blocks or reallocated means to take caution not always that it's going to fail immediately unless the count keeps climbing, crytaldiskinfo tells you, but I'm no expert, do more research
You can not rely on the SMART data, and TBH it seems wrong / tampered with in this case. It's common practice to reset SMART on refurbished drives. Specialized hardware allows to do this in bulk.
But anyone can reset SMART on a Hitachi drive with freely available tools. Contrary to common belief this isn't complicated, in fact it is easy.
Since we can find Hitachi technology in other brands too it may work on for example Toshiba's too. This, after a secure erase can make the hard drive appear brand new.
I know for Seagate's it's possible via the terminal port and vendor specific commands that can be send via a standard terminal program.
Did it look something like the below? If so, this is the standard packaging for a hdd to be delivered in. I believe it's just an anti static packaging which is sealed.
