A friend was banned from a particular game for legitimate reasons and has two unused SSDs, one 1 TB and one 2 TB. He replaced his computer because he still plays that game, and I could use the drives to save money on a new PC. I do not play the game that banned him and do not currently plan to. Could those SSDs cause hardware or anti-cheat problems in other games, or would they be safe to use?
4 Answers
I would not treat the SSDs as permanently dangerous hardware, but I also would not pay close to new-drive pricing for them. If avoiding any possibility of an anti-cheat dispute is important, buy new drives; otherwise the likely risk from using just these SSDs is fairly low.
The bigger question is which company or platform issued the ban. Some bans may be limited to one game, while others can affect multiple titles from the same publisher or platform. Since policies and detection methods are usually private, there is always some uncertainty if you later play related games.
If the drives are cheap and healthy, they are probably fine for normal use and games unrelated to the ban. Before installing them, securely erase them and check their SMART health, power-on hours, and remaining endurance. Formatting will remove the old data, but it will not change a drive's factory serial number.
A hardware ban usually is not based on the SSD alone. Anti-cheat systems may combine several hardware identifiers, such as the motherboard, CPU, GPU, network hardware, and storage serial numbers. Using only the SSD generally should not reproduce the exact same hardware fingerprint, though no company fully explains how its detection works.
That risk is not necessarily limited to the original game. A ban from one publisher's anti-cheat could potentially matter in another title from the same publisher, so checking the ban's scope is worthwhile.