Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I usually receive my hard drives from ebuyer in those plastic egg carton things with plenty of air bags stuffed inside a huge box enough to fit about 20 drives in!
Scans stuff tbh is always very well packed... :)
I remember overclockers sending me a £410 ATI x800 XT in a brown paper bag... no anti static, no foam or any accessories. The card had been sent to me second class postage and had been literally cracked in half, the heat sync was ripped off and various surface mounted chips missing from the board....
After a few failed phonecalls :telephone: i sent off an email... RMA was slow and at first i was acused of damaging the card... Got it all sorted in the end though... refunded and then purchased from scan for £50 less a week later when the prices dropped....
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Remember watching a Ebuyer video of a woman working in Ebuyer putting a HDD in a box for shipment, she threw the bloody thing in! :D
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
After reading these posts, I'm definitely going to buy my next hard drive from Scan. Bubble wrap is a far more effective child distractor than Barbie.:mrgreen:
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I had one from Ebuyer about 2 years ago, came in a fortified box (enough packaging to get lost in) - you could have drove a tank over the thing...
Guess things have changed :S
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I used to sell hardware by mail order. My biggest customer was a computer shop in Malta. They used to order a lot of drives but anything up to 50% of them were DOA after being shipped to me and then shipped out to them. The kind of packaging used by the distros used to be a cardboard box with foam in the base and at the top. That obviously wasn't good enough.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I've only ever bought an HP monitor from Ebuyer and that came well packaged. I can't say the same for the "Next Day Delivery" as I waited four days! They did refund that and the problem apparently is serious lack of drivers by the courier firm.
Bubble wrap is excellent for saving if you are going to move house/flat in the near future. Much safer for wrapping stuff in than newspaper.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Scan and Aria have always packaged HDDs well for me, and again, huge amounts of bubble wrap. I've had HDDs from Ebuyer a long time ago, I forget how they were packaged, but I don't remember complaining. OcUK on the other hand were a little sparse with packaging. Beside the point though, my friends order was maldelivered (in the van and back to the depot) a dozen plus times due to OcUK only giving them half the address though, and as a result of this the entire order (3 HDDs, 1 UPS) was completely destroyed when it finally arrived (had to be collected from Citylink depot)
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I have never had any problems with ebuyer so I recommend them. Same for Scan, Aria (bough a HD last month and well packaged), Novatech and Dabs. About Overclockers, I have a bad experience with a NEC DVDR a few years ago, it was a model infamous of having reading problems, i paid £90 for it and sometimes it didn't read the DVD are recorded with it. i sent it back at my cost and i got one back with the same problem, very fustrating!, I even though it was the same unit but wasn't sure. I ended up buying a new one 1 month after from scan.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Forgot to say, cheap HD from aria comes with only 1 year warranty (imported via 3rd party or not official channel) so it might be better to buy it from another retailer with 3 years warranty.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Aria's super specials are OEM models mostly, which includes the terabyte drives. The drive advertised as the 16MB EACS on superspecial is actually the 8MB EAVS, which is why it's so cheap. Posting a comment about this got filtered, so obviously they want to carry on misleading people. Still worth buying for dirt cheap, quiet, reliable storage, but be advised, Aria are not in the business to be straight up with the customers. With the EADS having dropped like a stone in price though, and posting at Hexus earning you free shipping at Scan, it actually works out £1 cheaper to buy the infinitely better 32MB EADS from Scan instead and have done with it. You're not limited to one per order this way either... :P
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Just recevied a HDD from ebuyer for my aunties build - came in an air tight jiffy bag inside a cardboard box with the rest of the components.
Would say it was adequately packaged, not fantastic, but by no means poor.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Sammorris, I agree with you about Aria. They are not straight up. I bought a rather expensive Logitech mouse from them a while ago now and they delivered the European version which is illegal in this country! I was told this by Logitech as the lead was a two pin. They told me to go back and contact Aria again stating what they had told me.
Gist of it: Aria, after five calls still did nothing and didn't even bother to call me back. In the end I had to go back to Logitech and they sent me the correct lead and I have to say Logitech customer service and Tech support are the best I've dealt with.
They were not impressed by Aria at all!
As for ebuyer, despite the mix up with delivery they were excellent and I would choose them over Aria any time.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I don't think EU versions of products are illegal as far as I'm aware, as every single product shipped from Pixmania.co.uk is the french version. Aria used to have excellent customer service a few years back, but success went to their heads, they've removed most of the services that made them so useful as a company, and are now among the middle ground for shops. I still trust them more than OcUK and MicroDirect, which are the two worst companies I've dealt with, and again with Eclipse, who my friend had the misfortune to deal with, but when there's ebuyer, Scan and Specialtech around, there's little need to go anywhere else. Tekheads and Dabs sales always seemed quite good, but I've seen a few return horror stories, including from friends I know and trust.
I have to say, the returns process with ebuyer was first class. A fault that would have been difficult to diagnose was confirmed (perhaps it wasn't tested at all and still marked faulty?) within 30 hours of it arriving at their premises, and the refund is on its way. The only downside is they don't refund you the shipping cost of the item in the first place, or the shipping cost of sending it to them. They do arrange a courier collection for free, but since it's City-Link, I can't make use of that at home, as we have a 70+% ninja-card rate, so I had to spend £19.77 at the post office and 1h20 sending it by Parcelforce.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
Ive never had any trouble with aria, i have the numbers of some of the guys who work there, so ive always managed to get things sorted.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I had an email from Aria after having reported the HDD issue. They say they sell both, and they do, and would recommend I RMA the EAVS drives if I received the wrong item. However, when you click superspecial from the page of either the EAVS, or the EACS, it takes you to the same page, but with the title of whichever drive you were looking at first. The specs further down always say WD10EACS, but the WD10EAVS is what you end up with, on three separate occasions. I tried to explain this to them, will see what happens.
Re: Ebuyer & hard drive packaging
I usually use Scan, who package everything in tonnes of bubblewrap (even things like cables come bubblewrapped, but it always comes in handy for eBay) but this time I couldn't pass on the Hitachi 1TB offer at eBuyer. I ordered two of the disks, and they were delivered (quickly) in their regular anti-moisure+static bag which was in turn in a sealed padded plastic envelope and these were in turn separated by a layer of Storopack AIRplus bags and then the whole lot was surrounded by another layer of AIRplus and put into a sturdy box.
Aria are often cheap, and I've never had any problems with things I've ordered from them, but I have been disappointed when they deliver things like OEM TV tuner cards in nothing more than a padded envelope (which then gets shoved through my rather stiff brass letterbox cover). Fortunately everything has always arrived intact, but the potential to break the PCB or knock of a capacitor is huge.