Possible Shipping Damage: Best Way To Test NAS HDDs?

I just received an order for the HGST 4TB NAS HDDs I purchased from NewEgg. There was a sale a few days ago and I decided to grab five of them. Well I wasn't too happy when the box they were shipped arrived looking pretty beat-up, courtesy of UPS.

My NAS isn't up and running yet as I'm still deciding on which way to go (FreeNAS build or QNAP 4-bay Box). Luckily the five HDDs actually came in retail packaging but one of the five packages has a slightly dented corner that either happened from the shipping box being crushed while in transit via UPS, or was dropped prior to being shipped by NewEgg's warehouse personal.

I'm not sure what I should do at this point. I haven't opened the retail packaging yet to inspect the drives and was considering sending the whole thing back. I still may do that but not sure how NewEgg will respond if I request a refund due to shipping damage.

They were on sale for $150 each so I saved about $100 off the going price. So should I decide to keep them and open them up to test them, what's the best way to verify they're in proper working order besides installing and testing them in a server or NAS box?

badblocks 4 pass test. It should take around 50 hours per drive. I look at the SMART raw data before during and after the test. If there is a single bad block reported for a drive I rerun the test 2 times. If there is any badblocks reported in that RMA time.

You have the added benefit of those also being buffered by Retail boxes inside.

do you have any idea how long of a journey and how many times they have been moved and dropped before reaching you? if THAT is the worst bounce those drives have taken in the entire time since leaving the assembly line i would be shocked.

people have know idea what goes on, if you want clean food you need to grow eat and process it yourself. if you want a quality used vehicle you better know a thing or 2 about used cars.

unbox those drives and run them. the drive that had the dented retail box is the only one i would even bother doing a badblock test on. the only way you will know if you got good drives or not is to use them for 2 years and see if any fail.

If the retail boxes are undamaged, I would just use them. If a drive does die, that's what backups are for.

Ivan_Only said:

If the retail boxes are undamaged, I would just use them. If a drive does die, that's what backups are for.

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I say regardless of how they are shipped and if they are enterprise or not I now always rigorously test every single drive I get. I have had way too many DOA drives to not do that. This is even though I have backups.

I love the irony of the package branding !

drescherjm : if they're DOA there's no need to test them is there ?

drescherjm said:

I say regardless of how they are shipped and if they are enterprise or not I now always rigorously test every single drive I get. I have had way too many DOA drives to not do that. This is even though I have backups.

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I agree this is best practice for enterprise solutions, but for personal use I think this is a bit overkill. Out of all of the HD's I have ever purchased, I have only had one bad drive. Not worth the effort of hours or days of testing to see if a drive is bad.

if they're DOA there's no need to test them is there ?

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Some drives will appear to work but die within a very short period (I have had several dozen do this at work across all manufacturers) or have an extremely high URE rate. I count these in the same category. Although this is a case of infant mortality.