Hard Drive Tester

[m4ng0]

I am a technician for a IT department at a private university. We have accumulated many hard drives over the years, and would like to invest in a standalone hard drive tester so we can dispose of the bad drives and re-purpose the good working ones. We would also like to use the tester on current systems where we suspect a bad hard drive may be in play.

I did a quick google search for an external hard drive tester, and didn't really find anything of merit. I was wondering if you guys know of a good, reliable tester, that handles both IDE and SATA at a reasonable price (under $500).

Thanks in advance.

 

[craftech]

Originally posted by: m4ng0
I am a technician for a IT department at a private university. We have accumulated many hard drives over the years, and would like to invest in a standalone hard drive tester so we can dispose of the bad drives and re-purpose the good working ones. We would also like to use the tester on current systems where we suspect a bad hard drive may be in play.

I did a quick google search for an external hard drive tester, and didn't really find anything of merit. I was wondering if you guys know of a good, reliable tester, that handles both IDE and SATA at a reasonable price (under $500).

Thanks in advance.

Why don't you build an inexpensive open frame computer with a bay for IDE and SATA hard drives. You could then boot to the corresponding DOS diagnostics diskette or CD for the manufacturer of the drive. They all have the utilities for free download on their websites.

You can buy test benches and add your own parts, but they are kind of expensive:

http://www.highspeedpc.com/

John