Did they discover that the counterfeits were more reliable than their own drives?
https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/
... some vendors have been found tampering with SMART data which can be done on certain models ...
In the post-chia[1] landscape, I would advise extreme caution in sourcing drives and a decent shortcut is to not buy from Amazon ...
Anything could be on there
edit: of course who knows what's on the hardware, but I haven't heard of the exploit that would doom me.
Some of those chips are straight up salvaged from other electronics. Some are "known bad" chips, hanging in by a thread while the flash controller is fighting to sweep all the bad blocks under the rug. Some are dead MicroSD cards - with the dead MicroSD controllers bypassed to access the NAND die directly.
NAND flash chips are "everything but the squeal" of electronics. There is a lot of chips that "somewhat work", and a lot of people trying to "upcycle" them into something that works long enough to be sold.
Rather, it is a combination of a highly intensive use case and a relatively morally bankrupt user base that results in a supply chain full of burned out SSDs.
I say relatively morally bankrupt… I am sure there are many delightful people out there mining Chia coin …