Whenever you do find yourself with new hard drives, I highly encourage you to do a stress test on them, preferably in the form of a badblocks test, before putting any data on them. The test does four passes and writes and reads back a different pattern per test to the ENTIRE drive (last pass being all zeros, so it is essentially zero wiped when done). Benefits to this are that you find out (while still easily returnable) if there are any bad sectors on the drive, and you'll know you're more likely to be on the good side of the hard drive failure bell curve, since they will all die at some point, it is just a matter of when. Very often people will just start using a hard drive and when they eventually get to and try to write to an area that's been bad the entire time, all hell breaks loose. If it doesn't kick back any errors and if you look at the S.M.A.R.T. data and make sure the drive didn't hide any errors from the test (by default hard drives reallocate the first few bad spots), you should have a good drive on your hands.

Easiest way to do the test is to burn and boot up a Linux LiveCD (like Ubuntu or, my preference, Lubuntu) (a LiveCD runs completely in RAM, so it does not affect your computer at all unless you command it to), open up a terminal window and type: sudo badblocks -vw /dev/sda

This is assuming that /dev/sda is the path to the device you want to run this test on and completely wipe, I can help you figure out the right device when you come to that.

S.M.A.R.T. data can easily be looked at by using "disc utility" in the system menu (which can also be one place to let you know the path of the device you're testing).

I can't encourage you enough to test your hard drives when you get them. This goes for everyone.