I bought two Western Digital WD360GD Raptor hard drives on eBay in the spring. One arrived dead.
I returned it and received a replacement. That drive also failed. By October, I was trying to finish the return without receiving a third drive from the same batch.
The seller explained that the drives were shipped without the normal labels under a special purchasing arrangement. The seller handled the warranty directly and said failures were rare. He did not have another Raptor in stock at the moment, although more might arrive.
I asked for a simpler resolution. I would send back the defective replacement and the other drive, which was still working, and take a refund. On October 26, the seller agreed to send the refund that evening.
The Raptor line was built around faster spindle speeds than ordinary desktop drives. That made the drives interesting for the servers and systems I was assembling, but speed did not matter if the hardware could not stay online. I was doing systems and network work at SimAuthor and running Praxis Technology on the side. I also bought equipment to test and learn from outside those jobs.
The email thread is mostly practical. It records the model number, the original two-drive purchase, the first dead-on-arrival unit, the replacement failure, the seller's inventory problem, and the final refund. It does not identify the project the drives were intended for, so I cannot attach them to a particular server without another source.
It does show the ordinary hardware work around the larger projects. Used and discounted equipment made it possible to build more, but it also meant checking serial numbers, testing each drive, keeping the correspondence, and being ready to return parts that were not reliable.
The final surviving message says the seller would issue the refund instead of sending another replacement. It does not preserve the later payment record.