Buying hard disks online - inadequate packaging

[Dark Black]

Since you seem to be buying a pair of those, consider getting them from different manufacturers, or at least a different batch (from different retailers). Depending on how you set them up, they won't, hopefully, both fail at the exact same moment.
Very recently I had an HDD on my daily backup die and SSD with projects die at the same time.
Fortunately I had backups at an offsite location and all my pr0n / projects were recovered successfully

Indeed, good advice.. I remembered about that after I'd ordered them (duh) - that is exactly what I did with the original 500gb Seagates.

Done now, in fact arrived today and in the process of resyncing the first of them. I do have a decent multiple backup plan so hopefully there won't be a future problem...

Full marks to Scan, drives arrived mummified in bubblewrap.. what a contrast to Amazon.

[VectraMan]

WTS. When I first setup RAID 1 I bought two identical drives, thinking that's what I had to do. Afterwards I realised that was silly, especially as RAID1 means they're doing identical work. Fortunately they didn't fail at the same time, but a few months apart, but now I have two completely different drives.

[yasockie]

In the past I also used to rely on on hardware solution such as HW RAID controller.
Nowadays I tend to use software solutions such as ZFS or Windows Storage spaces, especially for SoHo (and my own use). The performance hit is minimal or none (in case of mirroring) and the convenience and flexibility outweighs any cons for me.
If one of those drives fail, you can recover data on another Windows computer. With hardware RAID controllers this was not always possible without the original HW controller.

[Platypus]

HDD's ... how quaint ;-)

[Dark Black]

Irony

One of the disks from Scan has turned out to be duff...

It's getting RMA'd.

It would be ironic if the badly packed disks from Amazon actually worked perfectly...

*sigh*