I admit they were way too cheap for what they are (like 15% cheaper than same-size Ironwolf), so I gambled it haha there were no indications that these drives were OEM or similar.
Back to issue at hand: since I can’t personally have the five years warranty on these, only the original purchaser can, and I have no way to know who they are and when they bought them, I should just return them, right? And maybe buy the next ones only from authorized sellers?
edit: also, now that I think about it, and before I make the same mistake twice, there’s no way I can get enterprise drives as a normal consumer, can I, at least not brand new? I expect any enterprise drives I can find will have the same issue, i.e. bought by someone else for servers or similar, and then resold, correct?
edit 2: actually WD sells enterprise drives on their website, so my previous assumption about it was wrong
Hook them up, run a SMART test and see what their powered-on hours and error-rates look like. If it’s not a significant fraction of the MTBF, chances are you’ll be fine – assuming you’re using them in a RAID or ZFS array where a drive loss is not necessarily catastrophic.
Sorry for late reply, app kept saying “this account is being verified” and I coulnd’t comment or anything else.
Anyways, I kept them. One drive loss won’t be catastrophic (got two mirrored and also spare backup), so I decided to go for it!