Utility to burn in new hard drive?

For one, had the drive been damaged or defective, the purchaser does not have suitable packaging to return ship it. One should not have to spend time or money to repack a product in a way other than it was sent to avoid possible warranty rejection.

No, they do not fully absorb, somewhat diminish would be more appropriate. They are obviously suitable for general handling, but a lot can happen to a box between manufacturer and final delivery. Dropping it for example, though hopefully today's FDB bearing drives are more shock resistant than the old BB versions.

Depends on how much bubble wrap and how well it was wrapped. I tend to doubt someone mass packing orders is going to take the utmost care with each and every one. It also means one more stage of human handling, another potential for it to be damaged _before_ securely wrapped up.

Not necessarily, if the drive can survive in a working order but fails prematurely, say 1 year later, only the warrantor ever realizes it failed and since the warrantor probably didn't receive it re-wrapped in the same exact packaging, they wouldn't even know how the seller wrapped it. That is, unless some HDD manufacturers are now bulk packing with just bubblewrap but I suspect it would be shells and/or foam instead.

I am talkinh about electrical failure as well as mechanical failure. I guessed that alt.engineering.electrical knew more than a little about failure of electronic boards.

That's true. But I don't want the backup to be on my new drive if it is likely to fail! IYSWIM.

You may as well have been asking them for advice about which hard drive to buy. And of course that would be off-topic too.

Buy a reliable hard drive.

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comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage,alt.comp.hardware,alt.comp.hardware.pc

-homebuilt,alt.engineering.electrical

I think I know what you mean but I guess you are much more of a martinet than I am!

You say "Buy a reliable hard drive" to avoid problems with a backup on a new drive if it's likely to fail.

What hard drive would you buy which you define as "reliable" such that it is more reliable than what I might have bought and will not fail in its early life?

ALL hard drive manufacturers produce duds here and there. That's why you will see some people speak out against IBM/Hitachi or Western Digital or ????? Those are the people who got burnt because they were unlucky enough to buy brand X at a time when brand X was not doing as well as would be hoped.

But, over the long run, certain brands tend to be the cream of the crop. Your best bet is to buy Seagate or Western Digital. In fact, buy TWO of them, maybe one of each brand. Use one to boot off of, and get backup software to periodically copy everything to the other (or RAID it in a mirrored setup). Lately, Samsung has been making some pretty darned nice hard drives, also. But Seagate and WD both have more of a history of reliability, and are for the most part pretty rock-solid reliable, ignoring a few duds here and there (just like all brands) -Dave