What’s the catch? This is the best deal I can find on the internet by a fair margin. This seller has an amazon store page as well and seems to have a good reputation on both. The seller claims its a new HDD from a reputable brand and offers a 5 year sellers warranty.
34k customers and a 100% positive approval rating? Not one person in all those customers was even neutral about their purchase? Super fishy. That seems not possible. I'm guessing this is a total scam just from that.
Edit: after scrolling this sellers feedback it all looks legit. That's just so rare to have 100% with that many reviews.
I looked into this before with a similar deal by a 3rd party seller on Amazon. The enterprise drives (I was looking at those EXOS drives, too) must be sold by the manufacturer certified reseller or you run the chance of getting zero warranty. That being said, I've seen plenty of conflicting stories by people that bought them and needed to submit an RMA. I'd say it was a 60/40 split of honoring the warranty to not honoring it.
Long story short, it's a gamble. They're likely good drives, but you're rolling the dice if something goes wrong with them.
I bought four of those drives from SPD to put in my NAS. After testing and burn in, one of them started failing tests. SPD had me send the failing drive in and they sent me a new one. Otherwise these have been great so far.
Editing this 10 days later, having two more drives fail SMART tests after a sudden sharp increase in offline uncorrectable sectors. I'm trying to go through the RMA process now. I can no longer recommend this unless you're okay playing the RMA game until you get reliable drives. Backblaze tested the exact Seagate drives I'm using and only had a 0.60% annual failure rate. The fact that I'm seeing 3 out of 4 drives I've bought showing signs of failure makes me think something is wrong with the ones they're selling.
Oh sorry I didn't realize the ebay post was for a new drive. I just automatically assumed ebay was used/refurbished as well. My bad this doesn't compare as I was expecting.