I haven't had hard drives shipped to me from that seller, but I have received a bunch of them from others.

Packing and testing are key. Being a refurbisher, there is no way that I'll ever use a questionable hard drive. If there is a chance that it's on the way out, it'll fail. One SMART attribute, and it's scrap. A lot of drives will fail an attribute, but work fine. My laptop has a drive with a failed attribute, and the one before it went over two years with an attribute failed.



I clone my drive weekly, so I'm willing to take that risk. For a customer, though- no way!

That's why drives fail. If they're poorly packed, I don't know why you would think that they'd arrive safely. I've seen some lots that have just made me shake my head. Hard drives are the last thing that you want to use questionable packaging on.