New install - 2nd hard drive seems DOA?

You are right about Amazon. Some drives do arrive DOA, generally from poor handling during shipment. The vendor should always take a DOA drive back. You may want to try to contact Seagate Customer Service before processing the RMA and see if they have any better policy.

I think once you ship the drive off on the RMA there won't be anything they can do as the RMA depot won't have anything except refurbished drives.

While I have never had any DOA drives, except for three drives in my inventory, they all came from either Newegg or Amazon here in the U.S. The three other drives, one came from a retail brick and mortar store after one drive in a two drive array failed and I didn't have a spare on hand, the other two came directly from Western Digital for PC use, not NAS use.

However, I have three Seagate refubished drives in service (two in ReadyNAS units) and have yet to lose one prematurely, but there's always that first time.