To be fair that was a stupid ass comment.

You have drives packaged like other stuff with a colourfull box with marketing and all that? All the drives I have ever bought in store or online were shipped or handed over to me like I described above.

SSDs and external hard drives usually have some kinds of retail box here, but I don’t think HDDs usually do. Granted, I have never bought the normal consumer tier drives, like Seagate baracuda or WD Blue so maybe that’s why. For personal use in my PC, I usually stick with Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red.

Don’t HDDs usually come just in antistatic bags?

All the drives I ever purchased came in just a plain box with packing materials and the drive in some antistatic bag. So I assume the retailer gets big loads of disks from the manufacturer/reseller and unpacks them and then ships them individually and thus packs them on demand.