Disagree. You should never trust SMART data from second hand drives, full stop. No matter if it's wiped or not.
If you're US domestic market, then yeah, you can usually avoid Chinese vendors. If you're EU or elsewhere, China can often be the main/only source of affordable drives vs domestic market. Really depends (I don't shop for international buds/clients, but I constantly hear about how the homelabbers across the pond have significantly higher prices/lower availability for surplus enterprise gear in general)
Stick to the rules on reliable vendors with a return policy, buy in bulk with the expectation that some will be bad (not a given, but good to be prepared), and the only issue from buying from china is delayed shipping times.
It's not about the numbers as much as it is the LIE. There's no legitimate reason to take the extra steps to wipe a drives internal state clean. Like rolling odometers back, it has one purpose: fraud.
Oh I agree, but worrying about that in my opinion is stressing over things beyond my control as I can't verify that data is accurate before or after taking receipt of it, and it's kind of a moot point when buying a second hand consumable device as it's pretty much guaranteed to be used/worn. Also, devices can change hands multiple times before it ends up on the second hand market, with anyone in that chain potentially being responsible for fudging the numbers. It's why I start from the zero-trust assumption that the data is unreliable, always buy in quantity and always assume a non-zero failure rate of some kind (thus the reputable vendor with a return/refund policy). The failure rate is rarely actually that high in my experience, but it does happen from time to time and it sucks if you're trying to deploy for example a 4 device array, and you buy 4 devices but 1 doesn't work and as a result now the whole array can't be deployed.
If you're US domestic market, then yeah, you can usually avoid Chinese vendors. If you're EU or elsewhere, China can often be the main/only source of affordable drives vs domestic market. Really depends (I don't shop for international buds/clients, but I constantly hear about how the homelabbers across the pond have significantly higher prices/lower availability for surplus enterprise gear in general)
Stick to the rules on reliable vendors with a return policy, buy in bulk with the expectation that some will be bad (not a given, but good to be prepared), and the only issue from buying from china is delayed shipping times.