Thursday a set of four 2TB hard drives arrived on my doorstep. They were intended to replace a 4.25-year-old 4x1TB RAID5 array. I'd intended to plug them in this morning, initialize the array, create the filesystem, then copy over the existing ~2TB of data. The prolonged pounding from all of that activity would also serve as a burn-in test. Or at least that was the plan.
One of the three drives was Dead on Arrival. Well, strictly speaking it failed when it first powered up, but it's now as dead as a proverbial doornail.
In all of the years I've been dealing with hard drives, I've never had one fail immediately out of the box. Sure, I've had them fail relatively quickly (ie the classic bathtub curve failure model) but never right off the bat like this.
Rather than deal with a return-and-replacement via Newegg in California (~2 weeks), Toshiba offers a cross-shipped warranty service from their facility in Texas, which means I should be able to pick this back up again on Wednesday.
I'd hoped to get all of this drive swapping done this weekend since I have folks coming to visit next weekend, but such is life.