Like a year later and I've seen prob like 40% of these drives fail. I'm about done with platters.
I've been running 64 WD2003FYYS (RE 2TB) for over 5 years and I've only had 6 of them fail. One of them was a hard failure where the drive vanished from the SATA bus and wouldn't come back, even after a power cycle. The other 5 developed things like an offline uncorrectable sector and went back while the data was still readable. These were purchased in new bulk 20-packs from reputable places like Tech Data. I try to avoid buying drives at retail, even new ones, because the packaging and handling aren't always up to manufacturer standards. One popular online site is well-known for simply dropping an antistatic-bagged drive in a cardboard box with some air pillows (which pop the first time the box is moved).
I wouldn't buy a used re-certified drive, even from the manufacturer. While the majority of returns are "no problem found", an intermittent problem may not be detected during the short (24 hour) test the manufacturer uses to weed out the "no problem found" drives from the ones that are really broken.
I don't know what current manufacturers do with drives that have bad sectors. They might just put the drive (minus PCB) on a media exerciser and do a real format on it. If that's the case and some sort of contamination or head / media defect caused the problem, it will probably happen again at some point in the drive's lifetime.
I also don't know how willing manufacturers are to open up the HDA and fix things inside - while the drive is still in production, the assembly line and test equipment is tied up making new drives, and after the model is out of production neither parts nor test equipment may be available. Opening the HDA gets even more problematic on the helium drives.
That's why
I won't buy used drives (as I said, even from the manufacturer). I certainly wouldn't risk it buying from a seller who intentionally wiped the entire performance history (SMART data) of the drive before selling it.