Estimating quality of older discs?

[imported_browsing]

I've got an older build (4 years or so) that I'm cannibalizing, but I'm concerned about the drives inside. Is there a program sort of like memtest to check them for problems, or predict their remaining lifetime?

 

[Matthias99]

You can do a full surface scan with something like Scandisk (or Norton Disk Doctor). That will find any sectors that have currently failed.

Drives that support SMART (...something-or-other Monitoring And Reporting Technology) may have more detailed read/write error statistics (so you can see if the drive is having problems reading/writing certain sectors). You can get monitoring programs that will tell you if a drive in your system is starting to have problems -- of course, if the first 'problem' is that you lost some sectors containing vital system or program data, that may not help.

Beyond that, no, not really.

 

[DaveSimmons]

The 3 drives I've had die failed from mechanical problems rather than surface flaws.

One gave a slight warning that I missed (mailbox corruption in Eudora but no OS write error messages), the other 2 failed with no warning.

I now just assume any drive can fail at any moment and back up accordingly. With 4-year-old drives I'd probably just put one in an external enclosure and use it as a light duty drive for backups.

 

[imported_browsing]

I know this sounds silly, but if they're unused, they won't continue to degrade nearly as quickly? If I did what was suggested and slapped them into enclosures and used them for backups?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Powered-down, with no heat and no running motor? Maybe.

But when your backup drive dies, you don't lose your main PC drive. You just need to set up another backup drive right away and re-copy the files from your PC.