4 Bad WD10EALS drives in a row? What am I doing wrong

I ordered a pair of WD10EALS drives from the Egg and decided to test them using WDs Data Lifeguard diagnostics for Windows before putting them into use. I checked smart values first, and them proceeded to write zeros to each drive for 2 or 3 rounds. Lastly I ran the full test. One drive was flagged by smart as failing. The second drive got two more treatments, and even though it was never flagged by smart as a failed drive, it was eventually unable to complete the Lifeguard quick or long tests - would just return some unable to complete test due to unknown test element X. The WD KB said I should RMA because of the unknown test element failure, so I RAMd both drives back the Newegg.

The replacement pair has the same kinds of problems after the same type of testing.

Am I doing something stupid here? I haven’t used anything on these drives except the Lifeguard software, other than read raw smart values using Victoria. I think the odds of me getting 4 bad drives in a row is really low, but I think it’s even more unlikely that I’ve damaged these drives using WDs own software. I guess I am asking for a reality check before I RMA this pair as well.

I tested the first two drives on two different machines using the Windows version of Lifeguard under both Windows 7 x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64, and I’ve tested the new drives on the Windows 7 machine and a third machine using the DOS CD version of lifeguard.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I myself ordered 4 of these from Newegg to increase the capacity of my RAID array. Previously, I had used 4 of the 250gig WD drives and they worked perfectly for over three years running 24 hours a day. So I order the drives, they arrive, and I install them. One is bad right out of the box, so I RMA it and it gets replaced. A few days later I am having consistent dropping-out of another drive in the array. After much wasted time, research and frustration, I realize that using the Caviar Blue’s is NOT a good idea with motherbord RAID. But that’s not the end of the story!

I ditch the RAID idea and set up the four drives as separate drives. Reinstall Windows 7 and everything looks good. The next day I come home from work and one of the drives has failed. This is a second drive now, and I’ve had it at this point.