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Purchased a new HGST hard drive. Using smartctl on OS X the new drive shows 71 hours of power on hours

Does this make sense or is this a sign of a refurbished drive? I can't imagine why the manufacturer would need it powered on for almost 3 days. I can confirm these values are not minutes or seconds (they have not changed)

Model Family:     Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000
Device Model:     Hitachi HUS724020ALE640
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       71
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  • I am not sure how Hitachi ships their drives, but at least Western Digital I know for a fact that when you buy a new drive it has 0 power on hours.
    – Cha0s
    Feb 1, 2015 at 16:53
  • @Cha0s Not really. I've bought several new WD drives with a few dozen hours on them. Feb 1, 2015 at 16:54
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    A refurbished drive will have the SMART data wiped. You'll see ~0 power on hours on both new and refurbished drives. A quick thought, it may be a returned product, but it's just my guess, no evidence.
    – msg7086
    Feb 1, 2015 at 17:30
  • @MichaelHampton I am just lucky then. I've never bought a new WD drive with power on hours other than zero (I always check that and I've bought quite a few WD drives over the years). It may just be what msg7086 mentioned where they would wipe the SMART data prior to shipping or most likely a returned product with a few power on hours?
    – Cha0s
    Feb 1, 2015 at 17:40
  • Last i bought a new one HGST drive - HDN724030ALE640 3TB. When i put it ino my machine - it had 5 or 6 Power_On_Hours in SMART.
    – undefine
    Feb 1, 2015 at 18:41

2 Answers 2

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You may see a number of power-on hours on a new drive. It is normal for drive manufacturers to test their drives prior to shipping.

For instance, WD RE drives are burn-in tested:

Each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.

Hitachi is less specific about your particular drive, though they do say:

Engineered for the highest quality, the Ultrastar 7K4000 is put through grueling design tests during development and must pass stringent ongoing reliability testing during manufacturing.

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IMO anything over 10 is used. The last time I ran an extended "long" SMART Test around 3hrs. This does vary and a big difference from "short test". I bought a Seagate external portable 5TB from Amazon. I thought perhaps it was testing. Only if it was a small number of hours. In my case the drive has 1026 Hours powered on equals 42.x days. I only got the drive minus 8Hrs for a "Full" format. I decided to inspect after format. Usually any errors or bad spots show up during a full format.

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