I would buy 6 of these in a heartbeat
But for one minor consideration
I dont buy Seagate
But who knows, post flood new factory, maybe they build quality drives now.
I'm not sure which Barracuda I have; I think it's the 7200.12, but it runs just fine. Although, I think my 3TB drives are both Hitachi, and they also run fine. Ultimately, it isn't the manufacturer that pushes me away from buying one. I'm just being a bit frugal given I'm still not done shopping for Christmas gifts.
If you're really worried, just run multiple tests on your drive. HDD Scan is a nice, free tool along with many others. HDD Scan is nice because it can alert you to long access times,
which might be indicative of a looming problem.
I also probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone bought multiple drives and had more than one be DOA or go bad. Isn't the rule of RAID to
never use drives purchased from the same batch as there's a higher chance that if one is bad, others will be? I've always heard that, but I've never seen any statistics on it.
BTW: With Amazon you get that neat little exact size boxed HDD enclosure with the black plastic end caps - "frustration free packaging" as opposed to NE frustration full packaging.
Newegg's packaging shouldn't be anything difficult either. Sometimes they just put the drives in bubble wrap.