I bought a hard drive from Amazon about four years ago. It came in a large cardboard box half full of packing paper. The unprotected drive was rattling round in the empty half of the box. Never again. That's the last thing I bought there.
I just bought a 1TB nvme driver and they sent me a 500GB drive the first go. In isolation that's barely an anecdote you'd mention to people over drinks but this stuff happens ALL. THE. TIME. to me with Amazon.
I've had the opposite experience. Hard drives from Amazon have been in factory-original packaging (involving a lot of foam) whereas hard drives from Newegg have been in plastic clamshells rattling around in the box. In fact, 100% of hard drives I've ordered from Newegg have failed. (The replacements received from the manufacturer were packed like the drives I've gotten from Amazon.)
I think the TL;DR is that resellers are clueless about how the products they sell work. No doubt in my case Newegg got a big box of them designed for OEMs that were putting them in fully-built computers, but instead shipped them out individually. Maybe it's because they don't care, or maybe it's because someone made a mistake. Either way, it's annoying.
I am surprised people aren't selling fake m.2 SSDs yet, like they do with SD cards.
Both Amazon and Newegg are marketplaces, and at least Amazon has commingling issues which can obscure the actual source from the customer, even when you think you are buying direct from Amazon.
It's possible the differing experiences reflect different actual sources on the same marketplaces.
Newegg has recently had problems with their own stock being listed inaccurately, especially selling white box or oem as retail, or listed with incorrect warranty info.
If you call to return it, many of the call center reps seem to get genuinely aggravated at the company for allowing this to repeatedly happen.
