On a shipment of 8, I would expect 1, maybe 2 DOA. All other usual precautions apply (grounding myself before manipulating, not touching the components on the controller, ventilating the drives adequately when in use, using the antistatic sleeve when not in use, not subject the drives to any shock, not moving them until they are completely still, etc.). And before you ask, I did test the defective drives in two different enclosures connected to two different servers/desktop to rule out a faulty enclosure/motherboard. This is likely not to be an issue if the limiting factor is your NAS or your network link. So if you're buying these, I suggest you ask for f/w 3ea if at all possible, unless you're ready to hope that you'll be able to perform the update yourself (my motherboard is an Asus P5E, and the drives were connected to the Intel controller, in IDE mode) or are happy to get around 30-15% less performance in the first half of the drive. I did test them (20N and 28A, working ones) with HD Tune Pro, and for some reason the throughtput on both seems to be limited to 100MB/s over most of the disk, when it should start at around 135MB/s, at least with the latest f/w. Also, Hitachi confirmed when they sent the update utility that f/w 20N and 28A had problems, especially performance issues. By the way, the 3ea f/w update can only be done from Win 2000 or Win XP (it definitely doesn't work in Win7, even in compatibility mode), and the utility wasn't able to detect my drives in a fresh install of win XP SP3 on a WD raptor boot drive (they were detected by Windows of course), so I couldn't even try to update the drives. The Hitachis are only guaranteed for 2 years in the UK, and given this unfortunate experience, I'd rather go for the industry standard 3 years offered by Samsung on the F3. I have no idea what happened with this shipment and if this was related to the fact that they came from old stock, but along with the fact that the reseller couldn't guarantee that I would receive the latest f/w with the replacements, I'm going to try my luck with the Spinpoint F3s. This was even before they reached my TS-859. Out of my 8 7k2000, 3 were DOA (never worked, they made a few attempts to spin up, then stopped), 2 more stopped working after an extended test (no spin up), and another one seems on its way out (freezes regularly during extended test), so I'm sending the whole batch back.
Just to keep people updated, the f/w issue took a backseat as I tested the drives over the week-end.
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