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.