Testing new hard drives

[Pandamonium]

Did a search, but nothing quite matches my situation.

I bought two 3.5" 2TB Seagates to upgrade my RAID1 NAS and I want to make sure both drives are 100% before permanently deploying them. Here's the caveats:

1) I run OS X on my Macbook Pro.
2) I do not have a desktop anymore, but I have a SATA-to-USB dock that doesn't seem to fully support SMART status. I doubt said dock would play nice with SeaTools DOS, but I am not certain.
3) I can run Win7 through a Parallels VM, but do not have boot camp set up (and would like to avoid doing that, since I'd have to go through another round of calling Microsoft for licensing/activation)
4) My NAS is a Synology DS209, which does fully support SMART.

I'd really like to know what specifically SeaTools does. But I'll settle for knowing whether what I plan to do is sufficient.

I can see the hard drives in my Win7 VM in SeaTools. None of the advanced tools seem to work. SMART is greyed out. But I can run a Basic->Long Generic.

So far, the first drive passed the Long Generic. I don't have much in the log other than "Long Generic - Pass". I added to my NAS, and ran a SMART long test, which it also passed.

The second drive is running the Long Generic in SeaTools on my Win7 Parallels VM.

If the second drive passes everything the first one did, is it safe to assume the drives are good?

 

[Zap]

My cup is half full.

I usually start off by assuming all new parts are good. Only if there are issues or if I'm somehow running them outside of specification (AKA overclocking) do I test for problems.

 

[Pandamonium]

I've traditionally assumed all new parts are good. But in the past few years I quit doing my own builds and stopped following new hardware releases/reviews.

I've seen enough threads describing new faulty hardware that I'd like to test my purchases moving forward.

 

[ShintaiDK]

My cup is half full.

I usually start off by assuming all new parts are good. Only if there are issues or if I'm somehow running them outside of specification (AKA overclocking) do I test for problems.

Same.

 

[mfenn]

A SMART self diagnostic is pretty worthless predictor for drive failure. If the drive looks like it's working fine from a cursory glance (i.e. you can format it, copy files, etc.), then that's going to tell you about as much as a SMART test will.

Hard drives failures are however generally shaped like a bathtub curve. If you're really paranoid, I'd put them both in your NAS, create a secondary volume, and let it run with non critical data for 3 months or so. If the drives last that long, they will probably last 3 years.