Newegg Refuse to Free-Return a Vastly Improperly Shipped HDD

[Siyuan]

Hi all, I am a long time viewer on LTT but very new to this forum, and I know vibrations kill hard drives.

 

So I ordered a 8TB Ironwolf (non-pro) HDD on newegg and it arrived earlier today.

 

When I got home, I tried to rotate the box to pick it up more easily. (I know it is the drive ATM.) To my great personal horror, it made a very large THUMP sound!

 

So I opened it quickly, only to find this packaging.... The drive was sitting on a corner of the box with some loosly stuffed air pillows above it, with no measures to secure it.

 

So it has been banging around the box for this whole time during shipping.....

 

Of course I can't accept it. So I was contacting costomer help line, but the representatives keep telling me:

a) I did not open it, and

b) If it works when I open it

they can not refund a full charge (+ original shipping + free return shipping), because this is technically "I don't want it anymore", and I cannot prove the product _may_ be bad, or it may suffer from pre-mature failures.

 

Knowing hard drives, there is no way in freaking hell that I entrust my data to this sorry ass excuse of a "good" drive.

 

Now, the way I see it, there are 2 ways for me to go:

a) Waste hours of my time to find a reasonable representative who would take this drive back and issue a full refund + original shipping + free return shipping, or

b) per the representatives I talked to, if the drive fails when I power it up, they will accept my claim.

Now I can make sure it fails when it powers up and Seagate will blame Newegg's shipping dept. for it (you know how), but I'd rather not to, that just being a bad human being.....

 

So if y'all know a way to fix this, or if some reasonable person from Newegg is reading this, pleeeeease, feel free to leave a comment or contact me to remedy this cluster f-up.

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Bottom line, I can not accept this hard drive and subject myself to data loss..... DUH....

[WhitetailAni]

See if it powers up and works.

If it does, make it break somehow. 

The way I see it, this is Newegg covering their butts and you should be able to swap it out as they messed up.

[Siyuan]

I'd still rather not break it. I'd still prefer if they(Newegg) return this drive to Seagate and maybe they can re-validate/ re-cert or even salvage what is still good about it and not causing excessive e-waste.....

It's just I'm very very very frustrated. 

And their return policies do have a loop hole for them to loose a whole lot of money rather than pay for shipping...

 

[aisle9]

First rule of shopping on Newegg: don't shop on Newegg. If you must shop on Newegg, use their eBay storefront so you can force a return through eBay's policy even if they don't want to--and they don't want to. Their customer service has never been great, but it's an absolute turd in the last couple of years.

 

If you paid via PayPal, you can probably open a refund request directly through them. You'll probably end up paying return shipping, but you'd at least get your original shipping back. To be brutally honest about it, even if the drive is deader than the horse I'm beating here, Newegg will still try to make you pay return shipping. They sent me a dead refurb GPU and made me pay return shipping to exchange it for one that worked.

 

So, your remaining options. If the drive does work, you can run several full SMART tests and see if you get a fail, and you can write the drive to capacity to see if it takes everything and is readable. If your drive is passing SMART tests and the full 8TB is read/writeable, you're probably stuck. That said, the warranty on those Seagate drives is pretty solid, so if something does happen down the road, you should be able to replace it. Doesn't do anything to reassure you about your data now.

 

Newegg does inspect returns, so if you're thinking about doing something physical to make sure it doesn't work...my advice would be don't.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I'd hope you have a backup of any data you put on it anyway as ANY drive can fail at any time.

[AbydosOne]

Did you purchase from Newegg, or from one of the sellers on their platform? I've purchased at least a half-dozen HDDs (Seagate and WD) direct from them over the years and they were all in individual boxes with air padding sleeves (not like what you got).

[Siyuan]

I was new to newegg, I normally buy from Amazon, (prime) but it was out of stock and "other buying options" were absurd that day.

 

They were also out of stock at all my local best buy. (I ended up going to micro center to get one because I needed it to replace a failed drive.)

 

I was planning on keeping this one as a cold spare. (I'm working on more robust options, but somewhat bugdet constrained.)

 

I bought my drive directly on Newegg and paid with credit card.

 

I know any drive can and will fail, but I'm not okay with paying the full price for a well-known bigger hazard than it ususlly is.... 

[aisle9]

8 hours ago, Siyuan said:

I was new to newegg, I normally buy from Amazon, (prime) but it was out of stock and "other buying options" were absurd that day.

 

They were also out of stock at all my local best buy. (I ended up going to micro center to get one because I needed it to replace a failed drive.)

 

I was planning on keeping this one as a cold spare. (I'm working on more robust options, but somewhat bugdet constrained.)

 

I bought my drive directly on Newegg and paid with credit card.

 

I know any drive can and will fail, but I'm not okay with paying the full price for a well-known bigger hazard than it ususlly is.... 

You might be able to file a chargeback with your credit card company. Call the number on the back of your card, tell them that it arrived damaged due to negligence on the merchant’s part and the merchant won’t let you return it. They might say that your card only covers you on fraudulent purchases, or they might be willing to step in if you open a dispute.

[Siyuan]

I'll post an update here if any of the above discussed approaches went through, but I don't have time to deal with the cheeky basterds from Newegg ATM...

 

My cat just became very sick, he takes precedence over those sorry ass excuses thay call customer support....

 

In the mean time, you are welcome to provide me with more thoughts on the matter...