I’ve been buying used SAS drives recently, as they are cheap and work great. Got backups (3-2-1) and everything is in RAID to protect against drive failures.

Just this last week, I bought 2 10 TB SAS drives off eBay. They were listed as used. However, when I ran smart on them, I see the following:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:  HGST
Product: H7210A520SUN010T
Revision:  A680
Compliance:  SPC-4
User Capacity: 9,796,820,402,176 bytes [9.79 TB]
Logical block size:  512 bytes
Physical block size: 4096 bytes
Transport protocol:  SAS (SPL-3)
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK
Grown defects during certification 
Total blocks reassigned during format 
Total new blocks reassigned 
Power on minutes since format 
Current Drive Temperature:  44 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 85 C
Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 75:55
Manufactured in week 33 of year 2020
Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 50000
Accumulated start-stop cycles: 28
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 600000
Accumulated load-unload cycles: 30
Elements in grown defect list: 0
Vendor (Seagate Cache) information
Blocks sent to initiator = 294439620706304
Error counter log:
Errors Corrected by  Total  Correction  Gigabytes Total
ECC rereads/ errors  algorithm processed uncorrected
fast | delayed  rewrites corrected invocations  [10^9 bytes] errors
read: 0 0  0  0  4333  1795.381  0
write:  0 0  0  0 10333 26471.816  0
verify: 0 0  0  0 270 706.809  0
Non-medium error count: 0

If I am reading this correctly, the drive has only been powered on for 75 hours (of which, 36 hours are me), and it was manufactured in late 2020, so it is just over 3 years old. Looking at the bytes written, that is about 2 full disk writes (I’ve written about 5 TBs so far). The drive came in a static bag with a sticker that said drive had been wiped twice.

Could this be a case where someone has fudged the smart stats? Like reset them? Or did I somehow luck out and get some cold spare that was just never used for 3 years, and some reseller sold it to me for cheap?