Best utility for testing hard drives?

[fuxxociety]

Hi everyone,

Worked out a deal with my company, gonna start getting a BUNCH of system pull IDE hard drives.. Ranging from 20GB to mabye 80GB, all various brands.

I know each brand has their own propiatary 'fitness' test, but most won't work on another branded drive..


What's the best utility I can use to test the condition of these drives?

 

[imported_wonderwrench]

Originally posted by: fuxxociety
Hi everyone,

Worked out a deal with my company, gonna start getting a BUNCH of system pull IDE hard drives.. Ranging from 20GB to mabye 80GB, all various brands.

I know each brand has their own propiatary 'fitness' test, but most won't work on another branded drive..


What's the best utility I can use to test the condition of these drives?

Ontrack makes the utilities most manufacturers use. Trouble is a version that works on most drive brands not free. I'd use UBCD as it has most diagnostic utilities all on one CD. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[SickBeast]

HD Tune looks like it has an error scan feature. It's also a great benchmarking utility (plus it's freeware!).

 

[Rubycon]

My fav is spinrite six dot zero.

 

[fuxxociety]

after watching a few episodes of TechTV (before G4 pooped on it) and hearing about SpinRite, I decided to buy that and see how it works out.

I know, I'm a sucker for consumer media.

 

[Rubycon]

I could not tell you how many systems I got running with that software. It just works. Well worth the $80.

 

[imported_wonderwrench]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
My fav is spinrite six dot zero.

Yup spinrite6 is a useful tool. Trouble is it has poor support for SATA. Also for USB, Firewire drives. He would not have that problem because all the drives are IDE but Spinrite is slow as hell and it would take to long to test a bunch of drives. I still say UBCD is the best bet.
You get all these manufacturer specific tools on one cd plus several non specific ones as well.

Drive Fitness Test (IBM/Hitachi)
Diagnostic Tool (Fujitsu)
SeaTools for DOS (Seagate/Maxtor)
SHDIAG (Samsung)
HUTIL (Samsung)
DLG Diagnostic (Western Digital)
Data Lifeguard (Western Digital)
SCSIMax (Maxtor/Quantum)

 

[n7]

MHDD.

Surprised no one mention this one.

It too has trouble with SATA drives if they're set to enchanced/AHCI, but works great if they're set to compatibility/IDE mode.

And since these are IDE drives, it doesn't matter anyway, it'll work great.

 

[Rubycon]

Spinrite works fine for most SATA boxes we have (Dells). On some machines we may have to turn on compatible SATA mode so it sees it like an IDE but it works fine. For USB and other external drives I'd rather pull the drive and run it natively on its interface so SMART works. Speaking of external drives - many die an early death due to roasty conditions or bad power. The ones that have external SMPS adapters can subject the drive pcb to unacceptable noise particularly around equipment generating RF fields, etc.

 

[Nothinman]

I'd probably just boot up a Linux LiveCD and use smartctl to run the built-in SMART tests on the drive. The downside is that the USB storage protocol is crap and doesn't support SMART so you would have to pull any USB drives out of the case and install them internally to do that.

Also on that CD would be the badblocks command which would be much more thorough than just a SMART self-test but also takes a lot longer to run.

 

[tcsenter]

Use the drive manufacturer's fitness or exerciser testing utilities. If you use SpinRite to do a full health and reliability scan, its going to take 24 hours or longer.