That’s exactly what happened to me. Do you have someone higher up looking into it? I was told by Seagate that Newegg is one of their trusted sellers this should not happen. Seagate assured me they will get back to me. Whether that happens is still a mystery.

5 year manufacturer warranty listed on the sales page doesn’t equal OEM

That would normally be fine if it were Server Part Deals, who is familiar with drives and honors their own in-house warranty. Newegg won’t return a drive after their return period. This drive is sold and shipped by Newegg and is sold with 5 year manufacturer warranty. Not as an OEM drive. There’s no excuse for it.

I measured the depth of the wall which is 4" Is it a safe bet to get a 0.5’ patch cable to connect the two couplers? Or should I go with 1ft?

I used to disable EPC and PowerBalance on my Seagate drives and observed the same behavior. After awhile of using Seachest to disable these functions, I decided to re-enable them.

Mostly because I see no need to have the head hovering over my media at all times. I have no reason to save power, but I made this decision based upon how uncommmon it actually is to disable EPC and PB. Aside from a half dozen tech articles and various online posts.

In order for the drive to even get close to the amount of cycles they are rated for, you’d have to be witnessing some extremely aggressive head parking. (Based on 600k cycles) To give you an idea my drives park about 25 times daily on avg. (I have 3 min S.M.A.R.T. check intervals)

In my opinion and apparently every drive manufactuerer’s default setting it’s a good idea to leave defauly settings in place unless you have a really good reason. Even coming from a 24/7 always on, never spin-down datahoarder like myself I favor the “protections” of having the head safely placed away from the media over disabling EPC and PB. But to each is own.

I’ve heard a few horror stories of LSI HBA’s causing some serious data corruption. Most of these cases were due to insuffiencient airflow. When it comes to data integrity I wonder if LSI HBA’s in IT mode have more or less ability to detect errors or increase/decrease the risk of data corruption?