A method of binning disk drives by evaluating quality metrics prior to a final quality audit is disclosed. A number of disk drives are assembled, and a plurality of quality metrics are generated for each disk drive representing a plurality of operating characteristics. The quality metrics for each disk drive are evaluated for binning the disk drives into a plurality of lots including a first lot and a second lot. A final quality audit (FQA) is performed by executing a number of write and read operations for a plurality of the disk drives in each lot and classifying each disk drive as passing or failing the FQA. If the number of disk drives that fail the FQA out of the first lot falls below a first threshold, the first lot is classified as acceptable for a first tier customer. If the number of disk drives that fail the FQA out of the second lot falls below a second threshold, the second lot is classified as acceptable for a second tier customer.