Absolutely not. You think they couldn’t (or rather, wouldn’t) bury software to track and read your data? I will NEVER buy a Seagate drive if the sale goes through.
That was my thinking.
I always wonder if they built in anything special.
You think they couldn’t (or rather, wouldn’t) bury software to track and read your data?A data stealing trojan would have to be built into the firmware of the drive. I'm no expert but that would be very very hard to do.
Plus, they’ll turn to crap. You’ll lose data in a week, if the thing is still working. I know this first-hand.
The drive's firmware could indeed be written with some sneaky stuff to recognize "vendor specific" (i.e., secret) commands. Here's one for openers: One of these vendor-specific commands could be "give me the name of the next file in the disk that starts with [specified 3-character extension], followed by "give me the next X sectors of that file we were just talking about".
That wouldn't take much firmware at all and would probably go right through anti-virus stuff.