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?
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.