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?!
I haven’t bought an HDD in a long time, but is the drive’s packaging itself not designed for shipping? The last one I bought had a ton of empty space and shock-absorbing packaging inside the box.
I guess that’s the heart of some of the issues one or two others are taking with me having a problem here. When it’s said like you did, it seems like a reasonable take to me.
Here’s my take on the physics itself - when an object is inside a container significantly larger than it and free to bounce around, and then put through the shipping process, that introduces a lot of collisions that are admittedly usually small, but strictly speaking mathematically related to the magnitude of the impacts and the available space to move (accelerate before stopping, again and again), and reduced by the inner (OEM) package padding/shock absorption. Those collisions largely do not exist if the object simply has no freedom to move in its containing package - it’s just the less frequent collisions with even further damping (containing packaging offering additional shock absorption rather than free travel) when the containing box is moved. The packaging by the mfg may be designed to absorb impacts to appropriate degrees, but it can’t be argued that unknown stresses (due to the unknown handling by the shippers) have not been applied due to that freedom of movement (in my cases here in 2 dimensions), that would not have occurred if the OEM boxes were packaged in their container such that no freedom of movement was available. I have worked briefly with vibrations in industrial and once a small scale system, even, and we all underappreciate the effects of even just vibrations. Stabilization of sensitive components is a hard problem.
It’s not that expensive at all to just close up that space reliably with every order of HDDs. If you know you sell ~expensive HDDs, do that. I am, strictly speaking, just asking for a retailer that does that. But FWIW I guess I should acknowledge that the physics and relevant questions are interesting.
Edit: corrected a typo that inverted a detail, added a few clarifying words