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