It is WILD that anyone in tech assumes this will come as new. Simply no one makes the same model of "consumable" for 7 years. Intel doesn't even sell Intel-branded SSDs anymore, that division was spinned off.
It's also WILD that you would trust something as sketchy sounding as "Maestro Technologies" for a mission-critical task.
I bet they were cheap though.
Intel did last orders for that drive Dec 30 2022. The article was written in April, so the author was conceivably purchasing drives that had sat on a shelf for a year and a half. That doesn't tickle alarm bells in my head.
Secondly, maybe my scam detector isn't well tuned enough, but "Maestro Technologies" doesn't seem that much stranger than "Apple" or "Micro soft" or "Zoom" or "Snap." If it were XBBHHZZZAA, LLC, maybe I'd have more room for pause.
The takeaway lesson here is that Amazon has become less and less reliable as a source for items. It's especially bad if it's purchased from a third party (something Amazon seems keen not to highlight on the purchase page), but even FBA is not free of trash. They straight up sell pirated N64 cartridges for example: https://www.amazon.com/Cartridge-Nintendo-Smash-64-Video-Ver...