My advice, have the seller take back ALL the hard drives and get all your money back. Since you purchased on Amazon, you can always go through them if the seller does not want to honor a refund. Also, have the seller pay for shipping the drives back if possible, that can be difficult. Once done then try to purchase another set of drives from hopefully a more reputable site. I don't know where you live so I'm not able to provide advice on a source. And if the deal is too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.
Very sad to hear that you have had this kind of experience. I've been fortunate when it comes to hard drives but let me tell you, I have had some drives shipped in terrible packaging and surprised they made it and worked beyond the warranty.
Yeah, that's my plan. Whatever happened to them most likely happened to all of them. What's weird tho is that nothing about this was a too-good-to-be-true type thing. I thought I was buying them directly from Western Digital via their Amazon store, which I would have expected to be run by WD themselves, and the price was typical apart from free shipping. I didn't know anything about this Olive Branch Enterprises business until I reached out to an Amazon CSA for help. I'm still not sure if Western Digital's official Amazon store is run by this third-party or if the seller got swapped somewhere in process, maybe by an Amazon algorithm or something. Either way, I was certainly surprised to find out I wasn't dealing directly with WD.
The seller finally tried reach me, via phone call, last night at 11pm but I was asleep so I missed it. I called the number back this morning but got another Amazon CSA. However, this time the CSA was able to do a free replacement thing, which the first one hadn't been able to do for some reason, and supposedly eight more drives will be showing up on Friday. The email I received about it listed only six drives tho and the replacement order on the site is broken up into two groups of two and one of four so I'm not sure what all is going to happen. We'll see what shows up. C'est la vie.
I don't have any cameras or anything but it does seem like somebody chucked them. Maybe the truck they were on wrecked. Who knows. The only thing that seemed amiss is that the delivery report says the package "was handed directly to a resident" when in fact I found the box sitting on the driveway. But that kinda thing has become rather common in these times of COVID concerns so I didn't think anything about it.
I've seen drive with stickers replaced on them before. Some thing I just won't buy from amazon. I dont know if its just my resident area, but I have had terrible experiences with amazon more than a couple times in the past. Their prices really aren't even very competitive anymore, not like they used to be. I generally try NOT to buy from amazon, but many times, it's the only place to get certain things.
I wondered about the stickers being replaced. I couldn't see any indication that they had been tampered with tho; they appear to be well-adhered. I didn't see any model or serial type numbers on the metal itself to check against though.
In hindsight, I should have just bought a Mini with the drives already in it. The 8TB drive hit the price-per-TB target I was looking for but iX doesn't offer that size so I decided to source them myself. Next time I'll just upgrade to the 10TB drives and let iX handle it lol
