Best place to order Hard Drives from?

I ordered HDD from NE many times and never have any problem. If you don't want to take a chance and if you have Fry's nears by they do internet price match and you can pick one up there for the same price as NE.

I've had no problem ordering drives from Newegg and Amazon (4 internal both laptop size and full size + 2 external). Amazon has the superior returns policy if you're worried though. Also if you live near a Microcenter they may have the same thing or maybe will price match.

I have bought thirteen 2tb drives and three 1.5tb drives (all 16 were samsungs) from newegg and never a problem.

I've purchased a couple dozen WD OEM drives from newegg and amazon and never had problems with any of them.

Newegg at one time packaged bulk drives in a layer or two of bubble wrap and then a big larger then what it should have been. I know I've personally received a drive that way ordered with various other system components. And other's have reported similar stories. I didn't have any issues with that drive, but I would have preferred it be better packaged.

I haven't purchased a drive from them since then as I usually find my drives locally at a decent price, so maybe their packaging has improved in recent years.

Agree with amazon's superior return policy. If they ship it to you in inadequate packaging , just send it back. They'll pay for the shipping label and give you a full refund.

I recently ordered an OEM WD drive from Amazon with no packaging issues. As everyone else has said, it's hard to beat their return policy too.

Every single post above mine is good advice for suppliers . I use to be someone that would NEVER purchase any hdd other than WD. However , recently Assassin directed me towards giving the Samsung F4 a try . I now have about 7 drives in various builds and LOVE them . Low temps and quiet

Tiger Direct often times has some good pricing and never had an issue with there packaging either.

Ordered from NE, ordered from Amazon, ordered from some other online places over the years, purchased bulk and boxed at Micro Center, used to buy bulk at Market Pro computer shows. Never have had a problem with shipping or packaging with any of them. I'm not convinced they are as delicate as is being suggested in this thread.

My brands of choice for quite a while has been Hitachi (The Hitachi 5K3000 Coolspin drives are terrific.) followed by Samsung. Figure those two would be the ones swallowed up by WD and Seagate. I expect Samsung's drive business to suffer a fate similar to Conner and other brands that Seagate has purchase over time. Enjoy them while you can.

Samsung hard drive division being bought by Seagate...well it might not be the same quality. I looked over at newegg for the Samsung 2tb I had bought about a year and a half ago and saw many user reviews commenting that they aren't the same quality. Mentioned clicking noises...

Anyone have experience with Fantom drives? I want to send a 2TB to a friend of mine to load with music, that's what he recommended.

I think they make enclosures, not drives. The ones I've seen have been WD drives. My guess is that it varies, and they probably use whatever they can buy the cheapest in bulk. Just buy whatever USB drive you can buy the cheapest, and right now that's probably a Seagate at Costco.

To my knowledge, with the acquisitions of Samsung's and Hitachi's drive businesses by Seagate and WD, there are (at least for consumer products) only three hard disk manufacturers - WD, Seagate and Toshiba, and I think Toshiba only makes 2.5 inch drives. (Toshiba acquired Fujistu's hard drive business a while back).

I don't know if EMC or others still make enterprise drives or not, or if they just use drives made by these remaining three companies.

Over the years Seagate bought (and wasted) Conner. Maxtor bought Quantum and Miniscribe and then was itself acquired by Seagate. Hitachi bought IBM's drive business, and now has sold it to WD. Don't know what happened to others like Priam and Microscience.

No, Toshiba bought the equivalent of (and maybe the actual) Hitachi GST's 3.5" HDD capability (IP and manufacturing capability) from WD, and sold Toshiba's Thailand 2.5" HDD facilities to WD. It was just announced that WD and Toshiba had completed this transaction. Having a third 3.5" HDD manufacturer with about 20% market share was a condition the regulators imposed to allow the WD/Hitachi GST acquisition.

Thank you, I hadn't seen that. That's actually good news. So essentially the old IBM Deskstar business will continue, now owned by Toshiba. So at least we still have three manufacturers.

I like the deskstar hard drives :d

I thought they were IBM Deathstars?

http://www.fantomdrives.com/
So these are made by WD or another company?
If I was buying one for myself, I'd just pick one up at Costco, but it's easier for me to buy one online and just ship it to my friend.

I just had two Seagate drives delivered from Newegg today - each was in an anti-static bag with plastic shells on either end, encased in a thick cardboard box, keeping the drive nicely suspended. Those two boxes were then wrapped in packing paper in a much larger box.

BEST place is always going to be a local place, like if you have a Fry's, Microcenter, or even local computer place with remotely competitively priced hard drives. That's not to say online is worth the gamble, but you asked for best.

Problem seems to be packing and shipping if you read between the lines on a lot of the bad hdd reviews on the egg and amazon and the like. 2.5" drives seem to be less susceptible to this as they are built a little more robust for being moved around in a laptop all the time anyways....but for 3.5" drives, unless no where local can remotely touch online prices, I just assume buy local and take that out of the equation...and if for some reason you do end up with a bum drive right off the bat, you can always take it right back to the store to get another vs doing the waiting game with shipping and all.

Amazon for sure. quick and easy.

I'm not convinced that matters. First, I don't think these things are all that susceptable to shipping damage. Second, to the extent jarring is going to hurt them, it's just as likely to occur in shipment from the mfg to the distributor to the store as from the mail order distribution spot to your house. If you want to talk about lousy packaging, look how a box of bulk drives is packaged when it arrives at that local store. It's basically a cardboard box with cardboard dividers between a few dozen drives with no padding whatsoever. Micro Center generally has collapsing boxes of drives stacked in the middle of aisles. But despite the abuse, they always seem to work just fine. In contrast the bubble wrap or peanuts used in shipping one to your house is downright luxurious. And if you get a defective product from Amazon, they'll normally overnight a replacement to your house without waiting for you to send back the defective one.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. Are you talking about retail-box HDDs? Or OEM packaged HDDs?

For retail box HDDs, I've seen nothing but good packaging -- the HDD is tightly wrapped in an anti-static bag, then cardboard or plastic endcaps slip onto the ends of the bagged HDD and that is inserted in the retail box, completely suspending the drive by the flexible endcaps, which act as shock absorbers. I've never seen how those get shipped to Fry's or Microcenter, but I imagine they just put a lot of retail boxes in a large box.

For OEM packaged HDDs, I believe all the manufacturers use the same method. They take a rectangular box that is around 2 feet long and 1.5 feet or so in the other dimensions. They put a styrofoam form that fits tightly into the box, and has 20 slots in it for HDDs. The HDDs are in anti-static bags and one HDD is inserted into each slot in the styrofoam. There is a piece of styrofoam that goes on top of the lower piece as a lid, fitting tightly into the box. I have seen this type of box from WD and Seagate.

The problem with the OEM packaging is that once newegg (or whoever) receives the box of 20 HDDs, they take them out of the foam and then somewhat randomly pack them when they ship them to the end user. The best that I have seen is for them to take something like the retail box I described above (but plain brown) with endcaps when they ship the HDD. But all too often I have seen them just wrap the HDD in a layer of bubble wrap that has very large bubbles (say, about 3/4"). The problem is that the corners of the HDD can sometimes stick out in the areas between the large bubbles. If such a corner comes in contact with the shipping box, and the shipping box receives a shock at that point, then it can be just as bad as if the HDD were not wrapped in anything and was just in a cardboard box (like amazon ships books).

That is why I always prefer to buy the retail-boxed HDDs, even when I am buying from newegg or amazon.

I almost never buy retail boxed hard drives. Waste of money except for the rare instance where they are on sale cheaper than the bulk ones (happens especially at Amazon occasionally).

We're not talking about shipping raw eggs or fine porcelain here.

It's not a waste of money because you get a longer warranty.

Thanks, but considering the low price of hard drives, the low failure rate, and the extra you pay per drive for boxed ones, I'll self insure against failure and come out way ahead.

Considering how UPS treats boxes, you might as well be. I have ordered a lot of HDDs in the past, and newegg's packaging resulted in quite a few DOAs.

All 12 of mine came safely phew

I've bought many disc drives from both Newegg and Amazon. In a few instances,
both companies have shipped poorly packaged drives, but they've always worked
without a problem.

I haven't had any issues with my two Seagate Expansion drives from Amazon. The packaging seemed adequate.