My bet would be on someone in a warehouse mislabelling a pallet or something. Actual malice is a possibility, but it does seem odd to blow up an entire distribution business for some 16 TB HDDs, when HDDs aren't supply constrained at the moment. There were all sorts of shenanigans going on in 2020-21 when supply chains were disrupted (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-...).
>> It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.
If the distributor is dealing with new and refurb stock, I wouldn't be surprised if the refurb stock is being sourced from a more questionable supply chain.
Just speculation on my part, but I'm going to guess that something like this happened: old HDDs were removed from a DC, sent to a recycler, and the recycler sold the HDDs to a sketchy refurbisher that wipes SMART data. A supplier buys from the refurbisher, and the distributor buys the refurbished HDDs (without doing proper due diligence on the supplier or verifying the stock they were receiving). There's a mix-up between new and refurbished stock in the distributor's warehouse, which then results in various retailers receiving these bad refurbished HDDs.
Alternatively, the distributor went through unofficial/grey market channels to source these "new" HDDs. IMO, this veers into malice. No reputable distributor would gamble their reputation on sourcing new components via unofficial channels, as the risk of getting burned with counterfeits is high these days.
