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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Is there any kind of testing I should do on a manufacturer recertified HDD before use? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I ordered a drive from serverpartdeals and was wondering if theres anything I should do beyond plugging the drive in to test it

Should I do a full format to check for bad sectors? Or is that bad and or a waste of time?

CystalDiskInfo wouldn't help I assume because the SMART is wiped right?

Any tips or advice is appreciated

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Minimally a long SMART test, which is some basic diagnostics and a full disk surface read test.

But I also like to do a full disk write as well. One full read, one full write should be enough imho.

If you're in Windows download the manufacturer drive app to do a full SMART test.

Seagate Seatools: https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
WD Dashboard: https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/downloads/softwaredownloads
Toshiba Storage Diagnostic Tool: https://www.canvio.jp/en/support/download/hdd/ot_sdt/en.htm

Usually the SMART long test in each of these utilities works with other brands too. I know I've used Seatools SMART test on all three drive brands without a problem.

For write test you can either do a full format, or use DISKPART utility with the CLEAN ALL command. Note that CLEAN ALL will not show any status update, it will just run in the background. You will only know by monitoring the disk activity from the task manager. CLEAN ALL will wipe the entire disk surface. A full format will only wipe within the filesystem partition container. Not a big deal, just that CLEAN ALL is full disk, where as full format is partition only.

There are third party paid utilities like Hard Disk Sentinel that you can configure for wiping the disk with any pattern you want as many times as you want. Also will do a full surface read if desired.