HDD Shipping Damage

[tomoooo]

I recently bought a WD Caviar Black 2TB Drive from eBuyer in the UK. When the drive arrived it was packaged as OEM in a plain brown box, with the box inside a jiffy bag. The external packaging gave no indication that it contained a HDD or other fragile equipment.

Inside the box all that was there to stop the drive sliding around was a cardboard insert, but some of the structure was damaged with the cardboard ripped - the drive could rattle around inside the box. As the internal packaging was damaged it's surely a clear sign that its been dropped or subjected to some sort of movement beyond what it should.

The drive seems ok, it did fail to format once when I installed it but succeeded on the second attempt, this might have been a windows issue though.

My question is, even if the drive seems ok now might it have picked up damage that will manifest itself later? How much of a shock can a hard drive take without it being damaged? Should I send the drive back now as damaged or is it likely to be ok?

I'm a professional photographer and so want to be certain that the drive is ok before I trust my business to it. Obviously I have backups, but don't want to suffer the pain of losing a drive at a critical time.

Thanks,

 

[Lutfij]

thye are shown on the manufacturer site: seagate claim their HDD's can undergo 120G's+ of force.

basing one failure on a windows error is ...erm not professional. in fact you may notice a few BSOD's when you'll tax the system for data. run scandisk and do so until it checks out fine. If you encounter a hickup/freeze, you know where to point the blaming finger.