> I bought a stack of WD gold drives several years ago that had several thousand hours on them as well. I believe I got those off Newegg. When I asked, they said something about initial testing, but why didn't they reset the counters before selling them? Who knows.
Thousands of hours doesn't pass the smell test. There's no way a specific SSD goes through months of testing prior to sale. A couple of hours seems reasonable though. And I'd rather it not be easy to reset the counters, so they don't reset the counters after testing during manufacturing/burn-in.