Computer Hope
Hardware => Hardware => Topic started by: Ajfer03 on March 12, 2019, 06:49:30 AM
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Hey everyone, I had recently purchased a 320GB Western Digital hard drive from my local Goodwill, and I had also bought 4 Gigs RAM and a Dell Optiplex 3010 for a grand total of 34 dollars! Yay! I had installed Windows and had not run any tests on the hard drive considering it was from Goodwill, I should have, but I didn't. So install went smooth, and so did driver install and Windows update to SP1. I called it a day after everything was installed. I then woke up and wanted to play some Civilization 3 on the desktop, but I just kept getting a black screen every time I tried to turn on the computer.
Long story short, the program WD lifeguard diagnosed the drive with some filesystem errors at around 160 GB and some before that. I was pretty disappointed because I don't have very many 3.5" drives. So I pulled out a Neodymium HDD magnet and turned the drive on and let in spin with the magnets stuck on top and the bottom. After about two minutes of it spinning, and a Full Format in WD data lifeguard, I conducted two extended tests on the hard drive, and they all came back clear, and I also tested it with PassMark, and it came back fine.
So my question is, how did this end up working and should this drive be trusted?
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No drive that has reported errors should be trusted, least of all one that already been discarded by someone (Goodwill donation). Notwithstanding magic magnet tricks. Of course, in real life, no hard drive can be "trusted" one hundred percent, which is why we back them up.
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I have however had great luck with slightly worn dress shirts from Goodwill...
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I keep old drives as doorstops.
- Works good for that application. :P