Yes, THREW. I heard a thud as it hit my door and it was loud enough to get my dog barking.
Thanks delivery person, very cool. I hope that when someone else is delivering your expensive fragile items, they’re gentle with it so you don’t have to go through the anxiety of not knowing whether the hard drive you bought SPECIFICALLY as a long term offline backup might be damaged and unreliable before a single file has been backed up to it.
Like, if it was straight up broken after this, that would be preferable because if it breaks in a year or so, not only do you lose your data (potentially finding out only after your server’s main drive also broke and you’re trying to recover from your backup), and the website won’t refund you because they won’t believe that it broke because the person who delivered it mishandled it.
So again, thank you delivery person for making my digital life that much spicier for no reason. Hope you enjoyed those extra two seconds you saved knowing it’s not your hard drive or data. Also thank you for not even ringing my doorbell presumably because you didn’t want to be confronted by the new owner of the product you potentially broke. Or maybe you wanted to give the package thieves a fair chance at getting it before I did.
Incidentally, does anyone know how I can check the drive for potential damage? I’m currently doing a SMART long test which says it will take over 24 hours. How good is SMART at detecting physical damage as opposed to the drive aging?
It’s most likely gone through a much rougher treatment before the delivery driver.
True and that makes this ok.
My point is, that it wouldn’t be broken because the delivery driver chucked it at the door. If it’s broken it’s because the seller hasn’t packaged the product properly, since it is very well known that proper packaging is very important for sensitive products.
Don’t be a reductionist dweeb. That’s childish.
I recently ordered two barracuda 8TB drives. They didn’t arrive packed at all, like no padding whatsoever, just two of em raw dogged into the box in anti-static packets. One didn’t start at all (kept clicking) and the other failed after repeatedly disconnecting and taking like 2 mins to finish interview with the controller.
Not sure if Barracudas are still as shitty as they used to be, or they failed because someone packed them like shit. Returned them and got two Toshibas that were packed like they were the most precious thing on this planet.
I’ve had a perfectly fine experience with two drives I bought, and don’t know if it’s because they were premium products, but based on this I would still recommend Ironwolf Pro. It’s a shame that online shopping has to be such a tedious gamble, as some sellers are diabolical; marketplace hosts are often just another layer of defense for the seller and be for the buyer; and buyers have no chance of prevention against bad couriers. We should at least be allowed to whitelist and blacklist certain couriers from being used to ship stuff we buy.
I personally prefer to go for more expensive drives (not for the price but it’s a constant correlation) because of the increased reliability and expected respect around trading a more valuable product. As a result I even choose Ironwolf over Barracuda. I’m not sure if this mutual respect is the reason for my experience purchasing, but both Ironwolf Pro drives I purchased came in a specifically designed box with cardboard kind of stabilising packing, so they sit rigid in the centre of the box. I trust that a more premium delivery option also results in a higher paid courier, who can afford to do the job properly and with pride. This isn’t necessarily the case, and relies on the seller being a good seller.
I’m avoiding Seagate drives again now. I thought I’d give them another chance because they were cheaper but also it had been years and thought maybe they’d improved. I got 4x 8tb Pro drives on a ZFS raid in my Proxmox server and I had no end of issues. It went fine for the first few months but then I’d constantly get errors, eventually replaced the whole lot with Western Digital drives and haven’t had issues in years.
Was it packaged well? If it was bubble-wrapped around the drive (including the kind with really long tubes of air not the little bubble paper) that was form fitting it should be fine. Otherwise was it in some other way secured? For example in plastic holders that fit the square shape of the drive but hold it centered in them away from the sides of the box and those themselves securely held in place in a box not too big for them?
If it wasn’t packaged badly it will probably be fine.
Large drive full surface scans can take a day or day and a half so that’s normal.
What I would recommend is a read, write, read type test of the entire disk surface. Let your SMART test finish, there’s no harm in additional testing. But once it’s done go ahead and format the drive using a slow format option that writes zeros to the entire drive surface. On Windows this is unchecking the “quick format” option, on Linux using dd you can write zeros to it (make sure you have the right drive selected). And let that run. That will take the same time as the SMART test. After that run another SMART test. Basically you’re reading from the surface, then testing you can write to it without generating write errors, then reading from it again after writing.
There are disk utility suites that offer tests of this nature including those with more powerful read, write, read, verify type tests that use patterns to detect any corruption but they’re probably not necessary here.
Keep a close eye on the disk for the first 100 days of use as that’s when failure is most likely to occur. Put it through its paces. Don’t baby it. Fill it up with data you have another copy of and try another full SMART test after a month and another one at the three month mark. If these all come back clean, no SMART indicators show signs of failure or trouble, no reports of read or write failures then it’s likely as fine and safe as any other drive.
Should be fine if packaged well. Every hard drive I received up to now would’ve been fine to play football with, it was packaged that well.
As with any new drive (especially if you buy refurbished) you should run badblocks on it. Depending on the size this could take days, but it’s a good testament to the state of the drive.
You’re lucky it wasn’t a soft drive
If the drive turns on, it’s fine. Any damage that’s enough to break a hard drive will make it very clear very quickly. The only thing you’d really risk would be misalignment of the platters, which again, would show itself pretty much instantaneously. Drives are shipped with their heads in a parked position and in specially-designed packaging specifically to avoid these types of instances.
Does yours support the SMART conveyance test? That was specifically meant for this scenario.
But a much better question is how well was it packed? UPS/etc do far worse on a constant basis. If it’s original retail packaging, don’t sweat it. But if it’s something else, you’ll need to evaluate. I’m guessing you got it from Amazon, which has a reputation for shit packaging.
For real. A friend of mine worked at a FedEx facility for a summer while in school and told me the shit there is unbelievable compared to what you’d ever see a delivery person do.
Return it. Tell the company you bought it from that the delivery driver threw it at your door and that you tested it, found unacceptable defects, want a replacement and will not accept another delivery that is handled carelessly.
To me, it doesn’t matter who delivers what, it could be a foam yoga block for all I care, if I catch them throwing it they’re being thrown under the bus for not doing their job properly.
Don’t worry! Taking this advice and similar is perfect! Opening a package from said order of electronic hardware won’t immediately nullify the entire workflow of your support ticket before it even gets anywhere close to being seen by an actual human being staffer simply by the act of selecting “package is opened” and “item used” (to test if it even boots)…
Yeah. That’s smart AF. 🤦🏼♂️
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Hmm throw it around some more damage it nice and good, say this is how it was delivered and the drive doesn’t work and get a refund. Not worth the hassle of trying to figure out how to salvage the drive and dealing with the risk of data loss.
Edit: actually some of the other commenters here make some good points about shipping and stuff
Sorry for your loss, people are animals.
Report him and get him fired, then spit at him when he’s begging on the street. Some of us worked very hard to fulfill opportunities our parents got lucky into giving us and it’s not fair to waste our hard sat for at home money on these dregs’ incompetence and attitude.
If they didn’t like working as delivery drivers, they could just die, that’s still an option they have, for now, but I wouldn’t count on it next time their breed reject their cosmopolitan saviours.
SMART test failed.
Why aren’t you running your drives in a RAID array? RAID 5 is n-1, meaning you get n-1 total storage space and can withstand any 1 drive failing. You do need at least 3 drives, but that’s what you should be doing - not just running a manual mirror backup or whatever. You also get the speed advantage from striping data across the drives (although this speed is nothing to an SSD).
If you really want to be serious about backing up then it’s 3,2,1 - 3 copies, on 2 different types of media, with 1 in an off-site location. As a minimum.
But first off I think you should upgrade your long-term backup to have some kind of RAID array. With 2 drives you can do RAID 10 (RAID 0 and RAID 1 combined), you’ll only get the storage of 1 drive but you’ll have one to one redundancy and striping. With 3 or more drives do RAID 5 so you’ll have more storage (eg 3x 8GB drives would give 16GB, 4x 8GB would be 24GB, etc), striping for speed, and also the same n-1 redundancy.
You may need a PCIe card for RAID 5, not all motherboards support it natively. You should be able to find a decent one for not too much, if you look around. RAID 1 and 0 (and maybe 10) often are supported natively.
You should not be using Fake RAID (AKA BIOS RAID) at all. It’s software RAID, implemented by the drivers. The only advantage is that it’s sometimes easier to setup in the first place by someone inexperienced.
If you’re going to use software RAID, just do it through the OS.
Also, this does not answer OP’s concerns in the slightest.
Having a RAID array would make OP’s question somewhat moot - because a drive failure would be less significant.
You and others are focusing on addressing the likelihood of the risk. I’m saying it would be better to address the severity instead. The comment is relevant, just slightly more abstract, but very much on topic.
You’re right that motherboard RAID is worse than OS RAID. I just wasn’t sure what OP’s backup device actually is, if it’s a PC or some simple bespoke NAS box. But it’s more Hardware Controller > OS > Motherboard, generally speaking.
