Re: [totally OT] experience with Seagate Barracuda and NAS drives
On Sat, 17 May 2014 21:11:13 -0400
"Theodore Alcapotaxis" <theotaxis@mail.com> wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Eike Lantzsch
> > Sent: 05/17/14 07:52 PM
> > To: Debian-user
> > Subject: [totally OT] experience with Seagate Barracuda and NAS
> > drives
> >
> > On the contacts for the heads and also on the "washer"-shaped
> > contacts for the srews I found a brownish-reddish film.
> > I removed it with a white soft eraser.
> > After assembling the drives they work OK ever since.
> > Now I bought two 2GB Seagate NAS drives and on one I found the same
> > film on the contacts - just not as bad as on the drives which
> > failed.
>
> Are you an anti-American, anti-NSA activist? Or, are you one of those
> blacklisted by the FBI or CIA?............{just kidding}
>
> According to Edward Snowden, US intel agencies are known to have
> intercepted routers, hard disk drives, solid state drives, graphic
> cards, CPUs, etc.., meant for delivery to customers and insert
> backdoors in them.
>
> The brownish-reddish film could have been the result of some hardware
> modifications made by the NSA to the hard disk drives.
>
> BTW Seagate is known to have worked closely with US intel agencies so
> much so that China, at one point, insisted that Seagate MUST
> manufacture HDDs in that country and not elsewhere if Seagate wanted
> to sell its products to Chinese. This is to facilitate easy
> inspection of HDDs for backdoors by China's own intel agencies.
>
>
Oddly, I had a dead Barracuda in front of me when I read the OP, but
sadly that isn't the problem. I suppose it is ten years old...
Yes, there was a fair amount of this stuff. The (cleaned) contact
plating looks like tin, so presumably this is tin oxide, which is
conductive in thin layers but maybe not in thick ones. Gold must be too
expensive now (and ten years ago).
--
Joe
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