While 50 is a small sample size, the issue might be widespread since they bought their drives at a dozen different retailers, some of which are on Seagate’s official “where-to-buy” list. Some of the impacted retailers are quite large, such as Amazon and Mindfactory.

I mean, Amazon lets anyone sell through the site. Unless an order is specifically from Amazon itself, you could get it from any seller out there. It’s not like they’re going to conduct some kind of technical evalution of the product.