Is there any way to tell if the SMART has been reset/tampered with in any way? If you have a drive that claims to have 0 hours of use, but it quickly starts to rack up failure indicators… how can you tell if it’s spurious failures or a fraudulent tampered drive?
Seagate has a proprietary version of SMART called FARM. It’s supposed to be more tamper resistant than SMART, but it appears the fraudsters have figured out how to manipulate it too [1].
The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the serial number against the manufacturers database if available is also a good precaution.
These are probably things you should be doing whether or not the drive is allegedly new.