My concern is that Mark knows a lot more about hard drives than I do. Maybe he's got a good point.

For instance, I bought two WD reds from Amazon for my NAS, I configured them in a RAID pair, and they both eventually failed within a couple weeks of each other. Luckily I was able to use the RAID features to rebuild the first replacement before the second one failed.

I got the replacements the same way, so now I'm wondering if the reason for the failures was that the drives were shipped individually like Mark said. Maybe shipping them that way shortens their life span? Mark is making me wonder about that.