Drive Irony

[staticlag]

So I have quite a few drives. Some are high capacity 2 & 3 TBs, but I also have things ranging from 17GB to 1.5 TB. Around 50 in all, just for personal hobby use.

My most used drive is a seagate cheetah 15k - SCSI 160 drive with close to 8 years uptime, though I have some others and SSDs that are catching up.

That being said I have only experienced drive failures 3 times. All were laptop drives, and none of them were solely in my care since day 1, I inherited them from friends and relatives. They probably died due to head crash, but I didn't pull them apart to check.

So the irony is that my brother-in-law orders a WD blue from newegg for a build I am helping him piece together. And it's DOA. It runs for less than 10 minutes then craps itself and starts throwing I/O errors.

So anyways I just think, what luck he must have for his very first purchased hard drive in his very first computer build is DOA.

 

[dar124]

How was it packaged for shipping?? If it wasnt properly packed then it could have been damaged during shipping.

 

[farscapesg1]

I'm not sure packing plays much of a part with Newegg anymore. Personally, I think they have juggling contests with the drives in the warehouse

I just ordered two drives from them last week. They came packages pretty well in my opinion (individually bubble wrapped, each inside it's own box, then placed inside a bigger box crammed with paper). The boxes really wouldn't have shifted much, and the bubble wrap made the drives fit snugly in their smaller boxes. Still... 50% DOA. Yeah, yeah, it was only two drives so hitting 50% is pretty easy, but considering all the drives I've purchased from places like Best Buy, Frys, Microcenter, etc. as well as Amazon... the only DOA's I've ever received have been from Newegg (2 WD 500GB REs several years back, 1 WD 2TB EADS, and a Samsung 1TB before the floods).

 

[staticlag]

How was it packaged for shipping?? If it wasnt properly packed then it could have been damaged during shipping.

It was a bulk drive, so it had bubble wrap wrapped around it and placed in a 11"x6"x2" box and shipped with his PSU and DVD drive.

 

[JoeComp]

I was going to say that I thought hard drives were mostly steel and aluminum.

 

[Capt.Frito]

I am not entirely sure, but in my experience ultra-tight bubble wrap and ultra-tight packaging seems to be worse than a little loose. The packaging ought to absorb some of the high-G shock -- If everything is very snug, the shock wave will just transfer with very little loss. It seems like if the packaging were snug enough to preclude rattling around but not so tight to preclude all movement things might be better.