Mildly Infuriating

It's most likely gone through a much rougher treatment before the delivery driver.

If you're still feeling some kind of way about it just return it and order a new one. Don't think it will matter much though. That hard drive came all the way over here in a shipping container from Taiwan or somewhere getting beat to shit in open water.

Hard drives in their original packaging are exceptionally well-padded. I wouldn't worry about it at all.

I recently ordered two barracuda 8TB drives. They didn't arrive packed at all, like no padding whatsoever, just two of em raw dogged into the box in anti-static packets. One didn't start at all (kept clicking) and the other failed after repeatedly disconnecting and taking like 2 mins to finish interview with the controller.

Not sure if Barracudas are still as shitty as they used to be, or they failed because someone packed them like shit. Returned them and got two Toshibas that were packed like they were the most precious thing on this planet.

Return it. Tell the company you bought it from that the delivery driver threw it at your door and that you tested it, found unacceptable defects, want a replacement and will not accept another delivery that is handled carelessly.

To me, it doesn't matter who delivers what, it could be a foam yoga block for all I care, if I catch them throwing it they're being thrown under the bus for not doing their job properly.

return it and let them deal with the L

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.

Should be fine if packaged well. Every hard drive I received up to now would've been fine to play football with, it was packaged that well.

As with any new drive (especially if you buy refurbished) you should run badblocks on it. Depending on the size this could take days, but it's a good testament to the state of the drive.

I had to spend a half hour on the phone once with UPS customer service because the driver threw an envelope with computer memory in it into my driveway and it got run over. "Driveway" was not a word that seemed to translate to the CS person so finally I said "he just threw it in the road, there are tire marks on it and it's crushed." Which finally worked to get the point across.

Your story about hearing the thump reminded me of my friend, though, who said she could always tell when UPS delivered when she heard the package hit the house.

You're lucky it wasn't a soft drive

Does yours support the SMART conveyance test? That was specifically meant for this scenario.

But a much better question is how well was it packed? UPS/etc do far worse on a constant basis. If it's original retail packaging, don't sweat it. But if it's something else, you'll need to evaluate. I'm guessing you got it from Amazon, which has a reputation for shit packaging.

Hmm throw it around some more damage it nice and good, say this is how it was delivered and the drive doesn't work and get a refund. Not worth the hassle of trying to figure out how to salvage the drive and dealing with the risk of data loss.

Edit: actually some of the other commenters here make some good points about shipping and stuff

If the drive turns on, it’s fine. Any damage that’s enough to break a hard drive will make it very clear very quickly. The only thing you’d really risk would be misalignment of the platters, which again, would show itself pretty much instantaneously. Drives are shipped with their heads in a parked position and in specially-designed packaging specifically to avoid these types of instances.

I get the frustration. I wish people would just make the right choice and do better. However, for your own mental health take advantage of strategies to quickly move on from stuff like this. It builds up, it really does. Most stuff delivered today has some kind of insurance, take assurance in that. Like others are saying, just return it if it works and still bothers you. Yeah it's extra work, but you'll end up with what you need or want.

SMART test failed.

What drive did you get?

Sorry OP I know this sucks for you on a personal level but the comments are kind of funny.

Lemmy is all "Fuck your boss, do the absolute minimum, dont work one iota harder than you absolutely have to, dont fuel the corporate machine!" But when Lemmy nerds find out someones hard drive got thrown "how hard is it to do the job you get paid for, complain and get them fired, how absolutely dare they!"

Sorry for your loss, people are animals.

Report him and get him fired, then spit at him when he's begging on the street. Some of us worked very hard to fulfill opportunities our parents got lucky into giving us and it's not fair to waste our hard sat for at home money on these dregs' incompetence and attitude.

If they didn't like working as delivery drivers, they could just die, that's still an option they have, for now, but I wouldn't count on it next time their breed reject their cosmopolitan saviours.

Why aren't you running your drives in a RAID array? RAID 5 is n-1, meaning you get n-1 total storage space and can withstand any 1 drive failing. You do need at least 3 drives, but that's what you should be doing - not just running a manual mirror backup or whatever. You also get the speed advantage from striping data across the drives (although this speed is nothing to an SSD).

If you really want to be serious about backing up then it's 3,2,1 - 3 copies, on 2 different types of media, with 1 in an off-site location. As a minimum.

But first off I think you should upgrade your long-term backup to have some kind of RAID array. With 2 drives you can do RAID 10 (RAID 0 and RAID 1 combined), you'll only get the storage of 1 drive but you'll have one to one redundancy and striping. With 3 or more drives do RAID 5 so you'll have more storage (eg 3x 8GB drives would give 16GB, 4x 8GB would be 24GB, etc), striping for speed, and also the same n-1 redundancy.

You may need a PCIe card for RAID 5, not all motherboards support it natively. You should be able to find a decent one for not too much, if you look around. RAID 1 and 0 (and maybe 10) often are supported natively.