I was at my local pawn shop today and they had 1tb internal drive dirt cheap. They said that if it didnt work I could bring it back. Now, I know a lot of stuff in that shop is stolen stuff so im wondering if I do get this drive and install it can it be tracked down somehow by law enforcement in anyway over the internet?
Thank you.
In Soviet Russia maybe…
There could be a reason why they’re selling a 1TB hard-drive, you should look closely at the fact that it could be too good to be true.
You should find out why it was brought in and only buy it when you’re certain it won’t fail in the first month.
Possibly… . I would suggest wiping it with one of those programs that overwrites everything with 1’s and 0’s about seven times.
A question though, if you suspect that it might be stolen, what is the reason to buy it in the first place?
Even new 1Tb hard drives don’t cost a lot these days
You’re probably taking the same chances you would be by buying something off craigslist, or even possibly ebay…as pawnshops sell stuff on ebay. Newegg lists 9 1tb harddrives under $100, segate, western digital, & others… 3 year warranties on some of them…
Yea, it would have to be a killer deal for me to buy from a pawn shop instead of newegg… like $10 deal… because it’s only guaranteed not to be DOA from the pawn shop…
Randy
Its actually $30. Thanks for you replies.
That’s not a massive amount of cash.
Maybe it’s worth the risk?..
Unless the thing dies and you lose all your files.
I say again, beware of these so-called ‘ultra low cost’ deals, me and my father thought about trying craigslist once and thought it was neat that the entire Adobe Creative suite was available for a little over 100 dollars from my hometown, but it turned out the guy had a hack that turned them from trials into pirated copies (my father found that out when calling the guy on the phone)
That was several months ago and we never looked at craigslist again.
Yeah, it might be worth the risk and my decision to buy it depends on the answer of the question I originally asked. So far no one seemed to answer it besides Uncle Entity and I dont know if he is kidding or not. I know that I should beware of deals that sound too good to be true. I have done it many times before where I lost some money. So I kind of learned from my mistakes. Thanks to everyone that is concerned about me losing few dollars.
The matter is simple.
Regular law enforcement surely can´t track it.
Other law enforcement in the states, can or could maybe, but only with a judical order, which will surely not be given because of a stolen harddrive unless its a matter of national security, because the hdd contained some sensible data when it was stolen, industry espionage, CC data, research data, editors cut of movies… lots of stuff on a hdd worth stealing it for besides the physical value. And those stolen HDDs are registered for sure.
If the harddrive is stolen, and the cops have a trail to the pawnshop, and they come to you and the one the disk was stolen from has the SN, they compare the SN, and at least in my country, your whole machine gets seized. In Austria, they are allowed to seize everything thats hanging past the power socket - you can kiss your machine good bye then, althogh mostly innocent.
And last but not least you got to know If you can life with a harddrive which you got cheap because it got stolen from someone else. You might as well go and steal yourself one then.
Well, someone will buy it, that is for certain, but buying stuff you expect to be stolen makes someone nothing better as the thief himself in my eyes.
If you have to ask this question, then you should not buy the hard drive. It could easily contain a virus that won’t go away just by formatting the drive.
You can get a brand new hard drive by Western Digital for $100 at Best Buy. Get that instead.
If you can’t afford the extra $70, then there really isn’t that much risk in getting the pawn shop deal. But don’t expect the drive to be secure. Be prepared for it to take out the rest of your system or at the least, just fail one day.
And as a side note, it would be fun to run Recuva on it!!!
