More or less everyone knows that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Seagate did not label their drives with a date of manufacture like everyone sane would do, but instead used a custom and somewhat mysterious/confusing “date code”. For reasons that I’m sure made sense to Seagate, but definitely made no sense to Seagate’s customers, the date code refers to Seagate’s fiscal year rather than a calendar year.
The good news is that Seagate no longer uses the cryptic date codes and prints a full date of manufacture on their drive labels, just like everyone else. The bad news is that there are countless millions of Seagate drives made before 2016 or so out there, and most of those drives only have the hard to decipher date code.
The four- or five-digit date code consists of a two-digit year, one- or two-digit week number (starting with 1), and one-digit day of the week (again starting with 1). If the week number is less than 10, the leading zero may be left out; that seems to have been the case on older drives, but later Seagate apparently switched to consistent five-digit codes.
Now, there are several online Seagate date conversion tools. So far, I have not found one that actually works properly. That is, they produce a date which is close but very often off by several days or even a week. While the few days probably don’t really matter in the end, I find it unnerving and sloppy, especially because it’s obvious that one can do better than that.
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