I would return it, but if you are curious you can try some of the following to get experiencing identifying bad disks.

You could try a different computer or controller to be sure.

If you can get some writes/reads to work, you can use badblocks or dm-crypt: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Badblocks#Alternatives

Badblocks will write known data to disk then read it to verify its good. If the disk is malicious, this can be faked. badblocks is also a little slow.

Using dm-crypt in the wiki will write zeros through dm-crypt which will result in random noise being written to disk, then compare with zeros to verify reads are good. This can not be faked easily since the zero stream is encrypted as it is written to disk.

Don’t buy into tape. It is costly and is inferior to hard drives by most metrics for smaller scale operations. You can easily get 8TB hard drives for less than $20/TB. While tape is cheaper than that, the drive to actually use it is expensive, plus you get all the disadvantages of the tape itself.

Fun fact: you can probably buy a whole server, external sas card and disk shelf for less than the cost of a somewhat modern tape drive.

If you are wanting to store less than 100TB of data, it would probably be cheaper to use drives, then in 3-5 years buy another set of disks and still be ahead compared to tape.

Email isn’t that secure anyway (don’t use email if your life or freedom depends on it), so I don’t see that as much as a downside.