Same here, I'm not aware of any computer retailer were I could sensibly walk in and buy any vaguely interesting drives at a sane price where I could have any confidence that the drives had been treated any better than ones sent to be by courier.

I guess things must be very different in the US/Canada. In the UK the options are:

- big chain retailer that cater for non-techies, retail packaging, high prices, no 8TB NAS drives and the likelihood that drives have been juggled by a teenage shop assistant in the stock room
- tiny one man local computer shop, also no 8TB NAS drives, gets his drives couriered to him just like me, basically exists to repair computersAndroid phones for non-techies

Gone are the days of having a mid sized PC builder/parts seller in a nearby town. And even then that was only available in a relatively few places in the UK. It was easy in London, Manchester, Liverpool etc or if you happened to live near someone like Watford Electronics.

Not so easy for example in Sheffield, where I lived in the 1990s. Despite being a England's 6th largest city it never really had a volume PC parts outlet. Lots of one/two man PC shops, but never really anything bigger than that.

Pretty much all of my drives over the last 20 years have come via courier/post. I think I'm right in saying I'd had two drive failures in that time, one failed after 10 years (?), one DOA. Sample size, one