Do you check new hard drives for reliability/issues?

[RebateMonger]

I have gotten drives packed very poorly compared to this. (worst was where the drive is touching the bottom of the box with some brown PAPER crumpled around it to limit its movement, but not enough of it to even keep it from moving.

The worst I'd ever seen were two Hitachi 1 TB (five platter) disks from Tiger Direct. These were OEM and each was inside a container made of thin plastic with the disk free to bounce around inside. These containers were laying beside each other, directly in contact with the bottom of the cardboard shipping box. On top of the two disks was a bit of brown paper. They were free to move back and forth on the bottom of the box and to hit each other, with about six inches of free movement.

Tied for worst was MWave, with an OEM Western Digital 2 TB disk. The drive was wrapped with one layer of a VERY thin bubble wrap, which was damaged on one side (bubbles had been broken). The bubble-wrapped drive was inserted in a tightly-fitting thin cardboard shipping container. The two ends of the cardboard container were not taped shut, allowing them to partially open in shipment. The disk could have fallen out of the box and you'd never know it.

By comparison, Newegg, where I've been purchasing drives for years, has never had anything that I found very scary, although Newegg has seldom/never met the requirements of the disk makers for returning RMA disks.

 

[IGemini]

Never bothered with the stress testing out of the box, just went with standard scandisk and SMART readings, HDTune if needed. Out of 15 or so hard drives I've used, only had one fail after it saw 3 years or so of use ( Seagate 160GB).

 

[Modelworks]

I zero fill the drives twice then fill them to max capacity twice then at the end do a full format.

The correct test is a butterfly read and write verify. Zero filling doesn't really stress the drive since the heads move along slowly writing each track till the end. Butterfly reads and writes sectors causing the heads to have to move constantly to new sectors. It is like having a drive filled with 1KB sized files and telling the drive you want to read every one of them in a random order.

Even worse is the spin + butterfly . In that it does the butterfly test but also spins up and spins down the platters every so many minutes.

It will cause weak drives to fail so make sure the warranty is good and you don't have anything stored on it.
http://www.passmark.com/products/bit.htm