Jimmy Bradley wrote: > I'm just curious if any one else has noticed this. I've bought > hard drives from both Walmart and Best Buy. If I can wait, I order them > from newegg.com. I'm beginning to think that the staff at both Walmart > and Best Buy, somewhere along the supply line must dribble the drives > like basket balls. The reason I say that is all the drives I have bought > from those two places fail within a few months time. Has anyone else > noticed that? Just curious You might want to consider them as possibly recycled drives. If you don't have a copy of SpinRite you can force the drive to check all the sectors with fdisk ... fdisk -f -y -c -c or if you are formatting, mkfs.ext3 -c -c will also do this check. This will byte-swap check and should force updates of SMART statistics and bad-sector detection on the drive. Jed