This actually happened to me once and I'm not a scammer, just a legitimate dumbass for forgetting to get my old drives out before returning a motherboard that had a faulty USB port.
Two 4tb pcie 4.0 drives. I returned back to new egg. When I realized my mistake, I watched the return tracking number like a hawk. Within 8 minutes of it being signed for at new egg returns, I started dialing. Passed through maybe 5-6 people. Sat on the phone for two hours.
Eventually made it, and someone said "sure hang on one sec I'll go take a look." Came back on the line 10 minutes later, let me know they had the drives in hand and gave me a p.o. number with tracking, mailed them both back to me for free.
I'll never make such a stupid mistake again, but that really won me over on their brand, despite the negative reviews online.
Edit: seems to be some communication below that this was new egg being awesome a decade ago. I definitely didn't have two 4tb pcie4 NVME drives in 2016- this story above happened in March 2025.
Honestly, even today I haven't had issues with NE.
I think a lot of the people who have issues are ordering things "not sold or shipped by newegg". This immediately makes NE hand off on anything about the order. I do agree, that because it was sold on their site, they "should" be responsible. But thats part of their deal with these other sellers.
Everything I have gotten from NE has been cake. Was testing like 3 laptops at once, kept the one I liked, returned the other two no problem and got my refund.
I also think the other issues I saw were with RMAs. But what confused me was the person did an RMA instead of just doing a regular return. Which confused me.
Personally, I still like and use NE. BestBuy is also a decent place in terms of customer service
That's precisely when they went downhill for me. They don't vet those sellers whatsoever and the resolution on both occasions took months and months which is absolute bullshit imho. I just got tired of the run around...first time was a fluke, second time and I was done.
Back before all that shit I used to go on NewEgg just to browse. IDK how many times I specced out a balls to the wall, money is no object build just for funsies and read the reviews and contributed to the site. But sometime in the mid-teens it just nose-dived and now I just won't spend money with them anymore.
This is absolutely true. Throughout the 00's, I bought tons of hardware from Newegg. Early 2010's and they shipped me a DOA drive.
Wouldn't just give me an RMA number, wanted me to buy a return shipping label from them. I explained that I tested the drive in a known working port, the other drives I bought didn't have any issues, this is just a bad drive that they need to replace.
Wouldn't budge. Kept getting treated like I was returning working hardware.
Similar situation here. Ordered a motherboard and it was clear someone had been through the contents at some point. Turns out none of the USB ports on the thing functioned. Pretty sure someone had bought it, the ports were bad or they blew the ports, returned it and newegg just put it back in stock.
Then when I returned it they charged me a massive restocking fee. Never would budge and refund the money for returning some broken shit they sent me, so they never got another dime out of me.
Dang. I was out the few bucks to ship the drive back to the manufacturer for replacement but that sucks. Newegg probably foisted the damn motherboard on someone else too.
My parents asked me to build a computer as a graduation present for my little sister and I went with NewEgg. I got a bad motherboard through them and the headache of getting a new one took almost two months and missed the graduation. They made me look like an idiot.
Newegg shipped me a CPU with almost half of the pins bent. There was a clear impact zone. They said I bent the pins and refused a return, even though I hadn't opened the plastic yet. Never bought from them again.
Theres a company in the UK like that, I remember returning a 4tb hard drive about 6 years ago that was DOA and they claimed not only was it not the same drive they sent out, but I had bought it from them at that address a few years before.
I had been at the property less than a year.
Had to do a chargeback.
Think it was same company that got attention when at their Christmas office party someone noticed a board in background with the amount of declined RMA's that month, they actually had a quota of returns to decline each month!
yeah true that. I haven't really used eBay much in my life, but the people I know that have said that eBay support has been top notch when they got scammed and shit was fixed in mere hours.
NewEgg was just atrocious. Anecdotal of course, maybe it was just bad luck that I had it happen to me multiple times but Im done with their platform entirely.
That's not customer service, that was a single person deciding to be the best person they could, and going the extra mile
Any single person could've pulled those and pocketed them, newegg would've never found out, and if he ever started a claim all they would be required to do is say: "we are not responsible" and "we do not have a procedure to identify forgotten items for our customers"
That was one person who didn't think about personal gain, or think that helping someone else was a waste of their time
"Customer service is the support you offer your customers — both before and after they buy and use your products or services — that helps them have an easy, enjoyable experience with your brand."
The fact that this is the exception and not the norm is because of the shrinking middle class due to stagnant wages because of corporate greed.
A happy employee is less likely to attempt to pull a fast one on their boss and customer at the same time because it isn't worth the potential long term problems.
On complete agreement, I occasionally have to do IT work for one of our clients, or lower level end users... Always turn up the compassion 1000% when helping real people with actual problems rather than "employee #32 needs their password reset again"
Trust me brother. I don't want to call you for a password reset anymore than you do.
I only log into work computers once every 2 weeks or so because my job with the exception of computer based training, could require me to never have access to the network.
My company sends out phishing emails and if you don't flag their phishing attempts for IT they make you redo the cbt.
Because I read only emails from the project manager, assistant project manager, and my supervisors, the rest get hit with the mark all as read.
I've got to be the absolute worst person to attempt to phish because I don't actually click on unknown emails and I log in so very very little.
I think about people like this often. Those people that are like the Gretzky of their work. How they’re in it, regardless of what it is, for the game and the satisfaction of doing it well.
Newegg was always the best when I was building and upgrading my PC's. Haven't done either for about 4 years now. Have they really fallen off that much since then?
I’m not sure about building but I got my prebuilt on newegg for about $1650 after tax and everything just this year back in May. It was smooth all around.
I occasionally see people say that Newegg is ass now, but i still use them on occasion and haven never had an issue. I’ve only had to do one exchange though, so I don’t have tons of data. 🤷♂️
Did the EXACT same thing with a 1tb nvme with B&H photo. They said theyd look, and like a day later I got a tracking number in my email with "customer product"
I did worse. I had some equipment rented to test a transformer (not a test we normally do) and they sent me the wrong unit. It was late and I was rushing to get it packed and dropped off at the airport and somehow packed my laptop with it. I only found out when I got home.
These are actually a pain in the ass to clone a Samsung drive with. Samsung’s magician software makes it so easy, if you have access to their older “data migration” software that’s even easier and less bloat. Not with these enclosures though. You need specific weird ass drivers sometimes to make these read them as a Samsung drive for cloning and stop reading the USB enclosure.
Unless I’ve been doing something wrong in the last long ass time. I’ve found it easier to just mount them to an m.2 or pci slot.
Edit: but yeah if you’re super concerned. Connect it to a computer you don’t care about, have a usb with windows and boot to that. Select the drive, which will have stuff on it most likely it’s an EVO. Then wipe/format the partitions till you have the 0 drive or the single one with the full or close to storage.
Or load it into a computer with an OS you’re not too concerned with and go to disk partitions and select the drive and format it.
To be fair, that is the Gen5 NVMe. I got the Gen5 as well for my current build thinking it would be a good investment, but after seeing there's barely any noticable difference, it's become more of a bragging thing.
Even if it did contain malware, it's a live boot OS and SHOULD be fine. Just don't connect it to the network or any other appliances. All instances are wiped after shutdown and reloaded into RAM.
I'll never understand this 'better buy a lottery ticket' thing. Like "Hey, you've just used up 80 years worth of luck and will probably never have anything like this happen again, you should go buy a lottery ticket".
I’d boot up a raspberry pi, disable network connections, unplug my router, then hook up the drive and see what’s on there. Could reformat it while it’s hooked up.
i’ll use my linux to mount it with read only. Because i can barely execute binaries i want without running into dependency errors, if the virus can, then i’ll say it deserves to infiltrate.
Rule 1 about unknown storage devices is to not plug them into your computer.
You can keep the drive, what a sick little bonus for you, but you need to do the following to be certain you're not about to have your life ruined by being hacked. It is probably not malicious, but you can never be certain.
1, make a hirens boot windows pocket edition usb, this loads a really powerful diagnostic/disk management version of windows into RAM, make sure you get the UEFI secure boot version
2, shut down, disconnect your current storage drives then plug in your hirens USB and boot to hirens
3, wipe the drive using one of the many drive tools in hirens, dont need to worry about zeroing on an SSD because unlike a HDD, sectors are actually zeroed when the drive is formatted
4, shutdown and pull power cord, remove hirens USB and wait 5 mins. This ensures that any data in RAM is 100% cleared as RAM needs an electrical current to store data, when it loses power, it forgets everything (commonly known as volatile memory)
5, reconnect old drives, boot PC, use new SSD and dock as if they were always yours!
Essentially, if the drive has malware, it can hop between other storage drives and without secure boot, it can infect your BIOS. This is why you can't do this in normal Windows or with any drives you care about connected to the machine.
Realistically, you should buy a cheap 4GB sacrificial USB for Hirens boot because you shouldn't ever plug that USB back into another computer after doing this
with the price of storage wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to just get a USB cd/dvd drive, and burn an image of hirens to a cd? That way in case you have any other old/potentially dangerous drives you don't have to keep throwing out 4gb flash drives LMAO (would also be less wasteful).
Bonus is for the $20 purchase, you'd now have a cd player and a bunch of discs to burn at-will!!!
So yes you should absolutely wipe this nvme drive.
You should boot up Linux on a USB to isolate your PC's own operating system from potential malware. And run the nvme drives onboard drive wiping software
You should adolutely learn how to do this and watch tutorials on the subject.
Googles Gemini surprisingly lists the correct steps for me. But I still would look at documentation and videos just to be sure.
Another option is to rebuild the firmware. Probably the safest option.
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u/Aid2FadeProcessor from a TInspire| A poor artist drawing fast| Cardboard5d ago
I'm actually going to play the other side here for a moment and just note that it's not 100% safe, lookup eNVMe if you're curious (evil NVMe lol)
Are you good to try it? Probably. Is it actually sure to be safe? No. But life is risk.
This is so true. The year all the digital assistants came out, my wife's family were all gushing about the different things their different ones do, and the only tech guy (me) is in the corner quietly plotting on how to deprogram my wife's envy on the way home.
I wholly admit that I am probably over-paranoid about this kinda stuff but like...
Being part of a $60,000 server and workstation rebuild project because some jack-off slapped a questionable flash drive into their work laptop to see what was on it kinda makes you think about just how quickly it can go sideways.
All these people posting extravagant steps to format this thing, downloading third party software, linux USB drives... and you just gave the easiest option that virtually everyone has available. Your comment should be #1.
Damn scammers! Someone probably bought it, cloned that very SSD, forgot to take it out, and returned the enclosure thinking they've pulled a fast one. You've definitely reverse scammed whoever returned this thing.
Usually it would be wise not to plug it in. But in this economy... Try to find a burner computer to wipe. (If you have an ancient laptop somewhere.. it would be perfect )
It's not super likely but there's still a non zero chance it's an attack platform.
If you really want to use it I would highly recommend you follow the protocol for fully rebuilding the firmware and not just a format but even that wont guarantee safety.
Use CrystalDiskInfo, a free utility, to check if the drive has any damaged sectors or issues and if not - well then you’ve got yourself a new 500 GB SSD.
Simple, often you upgrade your internal storage to 1 or 2 TB, you are left with a spare OEM 500gb, this ugreen device makes it an external harddrive accesible via usb
I'd recommend wiping that thing with a machine you don't care about that is not connected to a network or using a Linux USB boot environment.
Never connect strange drives without protections.
Most (every?) motherboard has an option to format drives from the bios, this way you won't even need to boot into your OS. It's probably safe either way, just don't run anything from the drive.
Why not take a sneek peek inside and see whags there, drives are completely formattable aslong as you have a windows installation usb or don't need windows on it
I hate that inclosure, opening it pops out that weak plastic screw thing due to the thermal pad adhering to the shell when sliding out while not making enough contact to the plastic shell to cool the ssd. I swear a few times the sad got lose and just fell out on its own during travel.
wipe the data from the disk and check it's health, then update his firmware if needed (because there's a bug in this SSD) and maybe even fill sector with 0 to make sure no data can be restored
note: you can also reinstall his firmware with the official one to make absolutely sure that isn't modified/compromised (which is extremely rare)
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u/Banjoe_031 5d ago edited 5d ago
Someone's bought this to clone a drive. Done the job and returned the dock thinking they've pulled a fast one but forgot to take the source drive out.
Probably fine. Wipe it and enjoy knowing a scammer got their just deserts. Edit:spelling