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Buying used drives from Amazon Warehouse
(beehaw.org)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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datahoarder
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My guess would be that it's stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD's firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.
I haven't seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.
I've bought used / refurbished (not sure which) with erased smart data. It being all zeros was a clear sign of erased / tampered info. After running badblocks some relocated sectors showed up.