Testing Hard Drive Health?

[itakey]

I've used HD Tune in the past to test my hard drive health, and read the S.M.A.R.T. reports when a drive has issues but I forget what tests were good to run?

I have a brand new caviar black 1TB I want to test, and some older drives. What tests are recommended to run and see how well a drive does? Benchmark? Error Check?

 

[imaheadcase]

Most bios on motherboard perform this for you.

But like ALL of these tests, its not accurate.

 

[bigi]

It really depends how deep in terms of testing you want to go.

http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/testdisk.html

 

[bryanl]

Try MHDD to get a list of slow sectors.

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

 

[Level_1]

Try UBCD, it have MHDD, HDAT2, and most manufacture's own test in it.