Testing a used 2TB Hitachi HDD

[CZroe]

I bought a used 2TB Hitachi HDD from a flea market lady. She had a couple more but I figured that I'd test what I got before going back. So, I know IBM/Hitachi's old utilities aren't what they used to be, so what should I use these days?

I also got a 40GB Maxtor IDE drive to use in a PS2, so I'll be testing that too.

 

[Diogenes2]

What about Hitachi's current utilities?

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/#DFT

 

[CZroe]

What about Hitachi's current utilities?

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/#DFT

I guess I'll finally have to set up my Thermaltake Black X with eSATA (always used USB and DFT does not support it).

Basically, I stopped using their utilities after they no longer detected and remapped bad sectors on drives over 120GB (WDDIAG/DataLife Guard as well). Known bad drives would pass with flying colors.

I wonder if Steve Gibson ever updated his old utility (SpinRight, was it?). 🙂

 

[SickBeast]

I use WinAAM and there was one more but I forget the name of it. I don't use them for validation testing though; my method for that is to clone my current hard drive onto it and then defrag the hard drive and do some other intensive tasks.

 

[bryanl]

Run a program that can report the SMART information, such as HD Tune or HDDscan, and look at the reallocated sector count, emergency head retract count, and seek error count. Also run HDDscan's surface scan function, which reports slow sectors, not just bad ones. I believe these Windows-based diagnostics require the drives to be partitioned and formatted, but DOS diagnostics, such as HDAT2 and MHDD, do not.

 

[C1]

Just a warning.

I was trying to backup my system using Drive Copy (DC). My system consists of four different OSes and the backup, therefore, results in four separate imaged paritions. DC would error on the last partition (outer part of the physical HDD). The full backup would work with other HDs, so there is something weird or not right in some section of the original backup HDD. However, it tests okay with SeaTools. I agree, therefore, with bryanl.

Another possible way is to just do an FDISK and long FAT32 format of the drive using a WIN98 or WINME startup disk. It will take a long ass time, but from my experience, if it successfully completes the format, you can be pretty sure the drive is okay. (Bill's DOS is very fussy.)

 

[CZroe]

Thanks, everyone.

Run a program that can report the SMART information, such as HD Tune or HDDscan, and look at the reallocated sector count, emergency head retract count, and seek error count. Also run HDDscan's surface scan function, which reports slow sectors, not just bad ones. I believe these Windows-based diagnostics require the drives to be partitioned and formatted, but DOS diagnostics, such as HDAT2 and MHDD, do not.

Thanks. I remember doing this for a 1.8" 20GB Hitachi drive and I could watch the reallocated sector count climb just sitting there! What counts are normal?

Just a warning.

I was trying to backup my system using Drive Copy (DC). My system consists of four different OSes and the backup, therefore, results in four separate imaged paritions. DC would error on the last partition (outer part of the physical HDD). The full backup would work with other HDs, so there is something weird or not right in some section of the original backup HDD. However, it tests okay with SeaTools. I agree, therefore, with bryanl.

Another possible way is to just do an FDISK and long FAT32 format of the drive using a WIN98 or WINME startup disk. It will take a long ass time, but from my experience, if it successfully completes the format, you can be pretty sure the drive is okay. (Bill's DOS is very fussy.)

FDISK can't partition a drive that large even though FAT32 supports it.