Hello Selfhosted - I’m writing to y’all asking for recommendations for a retailer that will properly pack spinning platter HDDs for shipping. These devices are sensitive to impacts, and since I’m intending to use them for critical data archiving, they need to be packed with appropriate padding! Newegg is apparently incapable of understanding this.
In particular I am looking for WD Red Plus drives, 2x of them, 10TB apiece.
To name and shame Newegg, I have now gotten two shipments of these from them, around $400 each time, and they have botched the packaging so badly on both that I would never accept and trust these drives. The first RMA I requested included notes about exactly how their packing failed, and about how these devices need to be treated better, which were entirely disregarded when they packed the second round.
Who can I buy from that will take their clients’ purchases seriously?!
HDDs from the factory should come in a parked state, that means they don’t require any additional packaging apart from what they come in.
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.
What you’ve purchased are OEM drives. They are shipped in big boxes with other drives, slotted into foam slots. Generally a good packer will bubble wrap the shit out of the bare drives when they ship them to you. Retail box drives aren’t shipped like this.
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.
Parked state doesn’t mean much when the box the drive is in is launched 20ft during the shipping process.