WD 12TB Ultrastar DC HA340 7200 rpm SATA III 3.5" Data Center Drive

RIP Ultrastar

I've been buying Ultrastar drives for servers I manage for at least a decade, starting when they were still made by Hitachi. Always had the best luck with those, zero failures. This is compared to WD or Seagate drives, which I regularly got bad examples of. Even after WD bought Hitachi, the Ultrastar models seemed to have the best record of reliability, so I stayed with them. Today this all changes. I ordered 5 of these drives from B&H to replace aging ones in a server that I manage for a health care office. All 5 were delivered in anti-static bags that looked like they'd been torn open and chewed on by a dog. 3 of the anti-static bags had labels with a serial number that did not match the drives they "contained" (that word is doing a lot of lift). 2 of the drives failed catastrophically within 2 minutes of being powered, emitting horrible grinding noises before seizing up solid. 1 drive failed silently within 30 minutes. The other 2 drives technically worked, but I don't trust them to use in a critical environment like a health care office. To B&H's credit, they approved the return of all 5 drives, and they'll be refunding me in full at zero cost to me. They assure me that these drives had only ever been sold a single time, they were not customer returns. If true, that means that their supplier sent them inventory of drives that were in torn-open anti-static bags, many of which had labels that don't match their contained drive. That makes the entire inventory suspect, and nobody should be buying them at all. THESE ARE DATA CENTER DRIVES! This is completely unacceptable. Avoid like the plague.