So I just spent AU$1000 total on two ‘new 0 hour’ 14TB hdds from Aliexpress. A nightmare with a happy ending.
The first red flag was shoddy packaging and zip lock antistatic bags instead of sealed ones.
Checking the serial numbers on wd.com showed they were 6 years old and out of warranty. They are probably pulls from a data center with the smart data all reset to zero. They both passed smartctl -t long, and dd if=blah of=/dev/null, and a 3.5 TB backup/verify/restore so I am keeping them despite the false advertising. WD says they have a MTBF of 2.5M hours so should last me a long time as they are sitting in caddys and only used once a week for backups now that I am happy with their reliability.
The aliexpress store in question is https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009408678880.html#nav-specification
Since I complained heavily at them I notice that the have dropped the word ‘new’ from their product description. They still claim zero hours but that is because the smart data has been reset to 0.
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Wow really a nightmare! thank you for your share 
I was looking for some disks for my NAS 10TB I will avoid Aliexpres for the moment