Can't believe it survived

[Rick Law]

Some times, lucky star is shinning.

This box was a 6" x 4" x 3.5" box.  The 2.5" PATA laptop drive inside was wrapped in bubble (3 layers).  It was shipped from Shenzhen, China to the USA East Coast, and it took about 3 weeks to get here.  New 2.5" 320gb PATA drive is hard to find these days, so suppliers are hard to find.

One look at the box, I thought I was out of luck.  The box was crushed from 6" down to 5" on the less crushed side, 6" down to 3" on the severely crushed side.  The thickness was reduced from 3.5" down to 2.5" on the less crushed side and  from 3.5" down to 1" on the more crushed side.

I was not expecting the drive to survive.  Much to my surprise, it powered up AOK.  Using the WD "datalife" disk tool, the drive passed the WD quick test and the extended test both without errors.

Well, thank my lucky star tonight...  I am amazed it survived.

[Ampera]

We have relatives in Germany that like to send us things, and on one occasion the package we got looked like they shipped it across the ocean without a ship. It was wrapped in a big bag with a big sowwy from the postmaster general.

I've never had something that looked like it was half steamrolled. Considering most of my orders are rather brittle PCBs, if this were to happen I would be thoroughly screwed.