I bought a new XBOX drive off amazon once. Stickers says void if opened so I didn’t open the case till I found a larger drive and was going to swap the drive in the case. The drive inside was dirty as hell. Like it spent years in a dirty factory. SMART report looked good, but the drive itself was from 2011, but the controller board was from 2017. Some retailer was grabbing old drives and swapping the control board, I assume as repair or likely to falsify drive use hours.
I reported to Amazon as seller fraud, initially they said you are way out of your return period. So I had to explain it doesn’t when I discover a seller has commited fraud, it is fraud.

While 50 is a small sample size, the issue might be widespread since they bought their drives at a dozen different retailers, some of which are on Seagate’s official “where-to-buy” list. Some of the impacted retailers are quite large, such as Amazon and Mindfactory.

I mean, Amazon lets anyone sell through the site. Unless an order is specifically from Amazon itself, you could get it from any seller out there. It’s not like they’re going to conduct some kind of technical evalution of the product.

Drives do have serial numbers, though, so I suspect that it’s not going to be very hard to trace back up the chain, see who they were originally sold to, find who they sold them to, and figure out who has been fiddling with the firmware to make old drives look new.

I was looking at 4 and 8TB Seagate drives at various German online retailers a few months ago and there were indeed a few suspiciously cheap ones that could have only been disguised used drives. It irritated me so much, it made me postpone a server expansion.