Lately I found myself in the possession of several Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives. These represent the pinnacle of hard disk engineering; with 15,000 RPM, the drives deliver up to around 200 MB/s sustained throughput (both read and write!) and have average access time approximately 5 milliseconds. They run a bit warm but are surprisingly quiet.
Naturally I’m interested in knowing when the drives were made. But only one of four drives has a clear “DOM: 08/2011” printed on the label:
The other three drives have nothing on the labels that would clearly identify a date of manufacture:
That is different from most Seagate consumer drives which have a “date code” on the label.
Now, it’s possible to punch the serial number into Seagate’s warranty lookup. But that only works for drives directly sold by Seagate, and two of my drives weren’t (one of them is Dell branded, the other has no other identifiable branding). And even when the warranty lookup does work, it does not determine the actual date of manufacture. For the drive manufactured in August 2011, the five-year warranty expired in November 2016. Since the warranty period starts counting from the date of purchase, it makes sense that it only gives a ballpark estimate—basically if the warranty expired in Nov 2016, the drive was likely manufactured several months prior to Nov 2011.
These Seagate drives do not appear to report the date of manufacture through software (some other drives do), and although Seagate knows exactly what the drives are based on the serial number, the date of manufacture is not shown there either.
But there is one other piece of information on the label—the lot number—that looks like it might include the date of manufacture. Does it?
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