[gazebo]

When I read reviews for any disk on newegg.com I would inevitably come across reviews about DOA drives. The interesting thing is that some of the DOA drives come from the same order shipment.


Maybe it's just my extreme good luck, I've never had a DOA drive with the 100 or so drives I purchased over the years, from 700MB IDE to 4TB SATA. Or maybe I just took some reasonable care when handling them (always worked with power off; always grabbed the disk by the sides, never touching the logic board).


Sure I've had my share of failed drives from all manufacturers after a period of operation. But never one that was DOA.


So, what has been everyone's experience?

 

[Mfusick]

I think there certainly is such a thing as good and bad batches. If at the MFG level there is some small error it can cause a higher percentage of drives to be DOA, which often accounts for why you see so many DOA complaints from the same batch.


Soon enough this gets discovered by the MFG, they track this sort of thing from returns and RMA through serial numbers and such. That is why a drive that is not as new, or has been in production for a while is often a very safe bet from a reliability perspective. Time to get the bugs worked out. As much as each MFG of hard drives strives to be perfect, sh!t happens. This is something that effects all MFG's equally, they all deal with the same issues.


Also, I do think that if you don't get a DOA or very soon to fail event, this speaks well of your drive lasting. My experience having owned a lot of hardrives by all MFG is they either usually die pretty soon (inside the first 6 months) or they last for a while (more than 3 years). The only hard drives I've ever RMA in between 1 year and 3 years are WD GREEN drives, I think in some circumstances they tend to wear out sooner or fail sooner because of the intellipark feature.

 

[ericbsmith]

I've purchased dozens, but not hundreds, of drives. I had just one DOA, and the reason it was DOA was rather obvious when I opened the non-static envelope the casing of the drive itself was cracked, as if a forklift had run over it or something. Sure enough it made the click of death when I tried to plug it in, and Newegg replaced it without issue. Other than that I've had relatively good luck, though I've had a fair share of drives that went prematurely dead.

 

[mrfattbill]

I've had 2 instances where I have purchased multiple drives and had more than half (2/3) be DOA. One time was Seagate and the other time was WD.


Bill