I pulled the trigger two days ago and ordered two brand new WesternDigital 12TB hard drives (gold enterprise grade). You can find them on Amazon HERE.
I was pleased with the prompt delivery (the package arrived early) and proceeded to unpack what kind Mr. Jeff Bezos had sent me this time.
This can’t be good
What arrived was a large parcel bag with two smaller boxes inside.
So far, so good. It wasn’t until I opened the two boxes that the excitement faded. The packaging was beyond horrendous. The disks were wrapped in a single layer of bubble wrap and had been happily “flying” around the box, as I can only presume. While the disks looked fine externally, this is downright unacceptable. I would not have minded if I had ordered a book or the like. IT equipment is fragile and should be treated/shipped accordingly – ESPECIALLY items such as mechanical drives. I feel stupefied for even having to explain this. (read: “I have neither the crayons nor the whiskey to explain this.”)
Conclusion:
C’est la vie; time to send this load of shit back and find an alternative source for my new hard drives. I am not even entertaining the thought of possibly losing data due to internally damaged disks. That was the whole point!
Always check your orders and if you have any doubt AT ALL, return the package and try again (with a different supplier, make sure you check the return policy).
Another piece of advice I got along the way is that – ideally – you order disks from different batches and vendors to avoid several drives failing simultaneously in a RAID setup.
I will go out on a limb without trying to jinx anything and count myself reasonably safe.
Designing and maintaining a regular backup schedule and including cloud and off-site storage are of utmost importance.