Shipping Hard Drives

Recently I purchased four identical hard drives to put into a NAS device. What could possibly be blog-worthy about such a mundane event? The packaging.

Three of the hard drives came in identical boxes that provided reasonably good protection for these always-fragile devices. As you can see below, the hard drive came in silver foil that plugged into plastic holders on each end of the box (the foil is crumbled because there was no hard drive in the box when the picture was taken). The result was that the hard drive was suspended in the middle of the box and no portion of it came anywhere near the outer sides of the box.

As shown below, three of these hard drive boxes fit easily into the outer box that arrived at my house.

But the fourth hard drive was a black sheep. The picture below shows how it fit into the outer box, its box was much smaller.

The protection for the fourth hard drive was also different. As shown below, it came surrounded by bubble wrap which does not keep the  fragile mechanism far away from the outer edges of the box.

As shown below, the label on the outside of the big and small boxes were also very different. Again, these were identical hard drives. 

What to make of this?

Perhaps nothing. Perhaps Western Digital changed their packaging at some point. Nothing was damaged in shipping, all the hard drives passed diagnostic tests. 

But, perhaps the shipper didn't want to send two boxes or didn't have a slightly larger box, so they decided to put one hard drive into a smaller box that offered less protection for an inherently fragile payload. 

If you've ever ordered multiple identical hard drives from Amazon.com please let me know your experience, either with a comment below or by email (my full name at gmail). They are a great retailer, I'm a good customer of theirs, but I'll certainly think twice before buying hard drives from them again.