HDD's from Amazon?

Gaslight

Does anyone here have any experiencing buying internal HDD's from Amazon?

I just built my new PC an went with only one 500GB HDD to keep the cost down, and even that is a nice step up from the 320GB I had on my old system, but ideally I'd like to upgrade to at least 1TB total.

I ended up with a 50$ Amazon gift card and I'm debating using it to buy a twin 500GB drive to the one I have and just dropping it in right now. However, reading reviews on Amazon of various HDD's brings up lots of photo-documented horror stories from people who say their drives came improperly packaged, sliding around in the boxes with little or not protection.

Ideally I'd just order another drive from Newegg and not worry about packaging, but I'm really trying to pinch pennies right now after shelling out the cost of the initial system build and getting another drive for less than ten bucks after the gift card is used is a pretty attractive proposition if I could be confident that it would arrive intact.

There are a few reviews that say Amazon has started using improved packing procedures for HDD's in the past couple of months. Does anybody have any first-hand knowledge, the more recent the better?

zen-

A friend of mine worked for amazon, and apparently in the packing/sorting stage in the warehouse nobody really gives a shit about the condition of whatever it is that you're buying. They have a set number of things to put in a pile, and if the pile is over their head they'll just throw the items on there.

I'm hesitant to buy anything fragile from amazon.

Edit: this was christmas 2009 (that he worked there), so they may well have improved since then.

syndalis

Bought an SSD from them once, no worries.

I would be more hesitant to buy a hard drive proper though; they are rough in their warehouse.

Synthesis

I've picked up a WD Caviar Black from them before. However, I bought it in box, not OEM...so basically, it was the same box you'd get retail, in turn packed into a bigger box, filled with those plastic air bags.

No problems with it, but I can understand why people would be worried. That's probably what the return policy is for, after all.

kleinfehn

Make sure you don't skimp out $5 and get a less reliable hard drive. I know there have been some troubles with certain Seagate and WD hard drives, so do some research before you buy. I would also be against getting another 500gb hard drive for storage, because the risk of failure is now doubled.

Esh

Bought my Western Digital HD from them. No problems at all. They handle stuff just as gently/harshly as any other place that ships things. Don't worry about it.

Cameron_Talley

How do you think a HDD gets to a retail store? Angel wings? The packaging should be designed to protect it in transport.

Gaslight

Cameron_Talley wrote: »

How do you think a HDD gets to a retail store? Angel wings? The packaging should be designed to protect it in transport.

Yes, the original manufacturer packaging certainly should. The problem is that we're talking about OEM drives here from a reseller.

Perhaps some visual aids would be helpful.

This is how a lot of people have apparently received their drives.



On the other hand, some more recent buyers have apparently been getting this (looks more like original manufacturer packaging), which is more encouraging.

Cameron_Talley

Oh yeah, sorry my post sounded a bit harsh. I wasn't thinking about resellers! I order books from resellers all the time for my job (I work at a Library)....I'd be EXTREMELY cautious about ordering a piece of computer equipment that has moving parts from a reseller!

Daedalus

kleinfehn wrote: »

Make sure you don't skimp out $5 and get a less reliable hard drive. I know there have been some troubles with certain Seagate and WD hard drives, so do some research before you buy. I would also be against getting another 500gb hard drive for storage, because the risk of failure is now doubled.

All hard drives are unreliable. You want reliability, set up RAID 1.

Zxerol

A buddy of mine has RAID1 using the mobo's Intel chipset, and then spent mad $$$ on a 3ware card for another RAID5 setup. I told him he was pretty mad crazy and paranoid when he showed me his rig.

Like in the span of a month, inexplicably, two of his WD Black drives just ate it hardcore. RAID setup kept his data intact, but it was freaking bizarre. Both drives were from the same lot, and I guess that was just a bum one. So I don't make fun of him about it anymore.

Hard drives are just so horribly unreliable in general, once you think about it.

contraband

I -just- bought a couple WD Blacks from Amazon for a RAID. Now I'm anxious to see how they arrive.

Gaslight

contraband wrote: »

I -just- bought a couple WD Blacks from Amazon for a RAID. Now I'm anxious to see how they arrive.

Let us know when they show up, if they're decently packaged I'll probably go ahead and order.

contraband

I'm out of town right now, but I just called my apartment mate and he said they'd arrived. I ordered two hard drives -- they came big brown box, inside of which were two smaller brown boxes padded with those plastic airbags. The smaller brown boxes, which each had a drive, used the black molded plastic "bracer" stuff as shown in the picture above. They were described as "secure". Sounds good to me.

Ego

It's been hinted at but should probably just be stated explicitly:

If you like any bit of data you have, you'd better have it in at least two places.

As the saying goes, there are two types of people: those who back up their data, and those who haven't lost any yet.

Gaslight

Ego wrote: »

It's been hinted at but should probably just be stated explicitly:

If you like any bit of data you have, you'd better have it in at least two places.

As the saying goes, there are two types of people: those who back up their data, and those who haven't lost any yet.

Thank you for the protip reminder, but I don't really see how it's relevant to the discussion. I do back up my data on external drives. My question was about whether Amazon is a good place to buy another internal drive for my system. And if contraband's experience is any indication, sounds like Amazon is alright.

Thanks for the help, everyone!

mts

i got a harddrive from amazon and it was packed like the bottom photo with the black holders. it was really secure in there