At RimuHosting we’re big consumers of hard drives.  Seems live every couple of weeks we are getting a couple of dozen ‘extra’ drives.  (And note that when we buy servers we will typcally get them with two drives).

We get most of our ‘extra’ drives from Newegg.

Lately we have been noticing some pretty high failure rates.  Not mean times between failure of a few million hours.  But drives that the BIOS will not even detect.  And not just one DOA drive every several dozen, 3-6 out of every delivery we get.

We have cursed Seagate and switched to WD.  And that works fine for a bit then we hit problems again.

The latest batch arrived and sure enough we started hitting issues again.  We got this reply from the data center tech:

There were two failed drives, and a third physically broken. The broken one had the plastic casing around the sata pins and sata power dislodged on one end, and the pins were bent. One of the other two prevented the server from booting past it’s attempt to detect that drive, and the other did not show up at all.

When we followed up with them they reported:

They were all sealed and from the same foam container. I would chalk this up to newegg’s packaging. Some of the packages I’ve seen come through here from newegg can be described as poor, at best. Sometimes they pack things really well. Multiple drives always come in the multiple hard drive styrofoam containers, which is good, but is sometimes just thrown in a box with a little bit of brown paper int he box with it, and does nothing for securing the styrofoam in place.

So it turns out that the issue probably is not with the drives, but how they are getting from A to B.

Now how to communicate this to newegg?   And other vendors, too, since we have seen similar issues with other suppliers.