If they had drives fail 8 times in a row, something else is going on.
FWIW I had a problem with my two 3TB Hitachi drives... until I changed SATA ports.
Deal is apparently dead. In the meantime, another review has appeared complaining of a dead drive. I know that most computer problems are traceable to between the keyboard and chair (esp. on Amazon), but this seems a bit odd.
If I followed not even my advice but my experience I would not buy from Hitachi, Seagate, WD or Samsung, hell not even Maxtor. The only drive I have that still runs after all these years is a Quantum Bigfoot in all of its 6GB glory.
I have had problems with all brands at one time or another. WD were incompatible with my early socket A motherboards (wouldn´t be recognized), Seagate with the 1.5 TB fails (I swore by them before that) and failed drives every now an then of every make and model.
All brands have good and bad batches and series. Just look at reviews at several sites for that specific model before purchasing. 3-5 yr warranties are now standard so just be sure to stress the HDD when you receive it to make sure everything is OK. I personally don´t do it anymore, if a drive is faulty it will be immediately noticeable.
So sit back, install and fill up that sweet 3TB drive and while you are at it buy a second one as a backup option for all of your data. Your digital memories will appreciate it!!
Just to give an actually applicable and useful view of the reliability of the Hitachi 3TB drives, take a look at this article:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
TL;DR: "We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully."
FWIW the HDS5C3030ALA630 is the 0S03228 whereas the drive Amazon is selling is the 0S03230. I have no idea what the difference is, but Newegg lists them separately (both as OEM, so the difference can't be the retail kit). Can someone who bought the drive from Amazon confirm the model number?
like I said in the prev page, HDS7230 is the 64MB cache
HDS7 = Hitachi deskstar 7K 64mb cache
HDS5C = 32MB cache Hitachi deskstar 5K (amazon)
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/all-hard-drives/
Since there is some uncertainty regarding the model number, the drive I ordered on Monday turned out to be HDS5C3030ALA630. It came in retail box and included mounting screws. The retail box is pretty sturdy -- a good thing as Amazon didn't bother to include any padding in the shipping box.
I installed mine into a NAS and ran some tests. No problems so far.