Testing Hard drives (YAY SPINNERS!)

[comda]

Greetings Computer Hope!

I have some older SATA drives that I picked up and want to ensure that they are "good to trust". I've been looking around online to see what the best way to test drive is, but can't get an exact answer. To start, none of them appears slow, or clicks they all seem to function. I've checked their "status" using SSD-Z and all come out "good" with approx 2000-4000 hours (depending which ones). I know I can run Check disk on them, however, do I need to run something that long to ensure the drives are good?

All suggestions are as always, greatly appreciated from all of you.

[patio]

Best method is to use the Free diags from the HDD manuf. site and run them from bootable media...

[Geek-9pm]

Best answer:
Buy used  HDDs from a known vendor that gives a warranty.
Then use a diagnostic to verify the vendor did his work.

[patio]

Geek...he's not lookin to buy used HDD's...he asked for advice rescuing the one's he has...

Pay attention.

[Geek-9pm]

Patio, he bought them with out certification. They are worthless. Unless he spends lots of dollars on the kind of hardware it takes to certify a HDD.

[Mark.]

even new drives can fail, so making sure old ones are 'good to trust' is very subjective.

I wouldn't use them on a critical Server or mainstream company PC or NAS backup solution but each to his own - just make sure you have a good, trusted, backup process in place.

checking their SMART values may guide you.
like I said, as with any drive, they may last 6 months, or 6 years.

[BC_Programmer]

Basically there is no such thing as a drive you can "trust"- The entire reason Backups are so important is that you cannot inherently trust any storage device to not stop working at pretty much any given time.

There are "levels" of 'trust'- A drive that is already having issues is more likely to fail than one that hasn't shown any signs of distress, but there is no way to guarantee it.

I  have re-used drives in the same manner and try to avoid storing anything important on them as a matter of course; and even for drives that I do "trust" that still doesn't mean important information on it doesn't get copied elsewhere!

[DaveLembke]

If the system your using supports RAID, I would go with RAID 1 which is a Mirror. If one drive fails, the data is still accessible at the other. This isn't a 100% guarantee that you wont lose data, but if you have anything important, RAID 1 is a way of pretty much running a system in constant backup mode of changes written to both drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

I re-use drives I get from others computers and have a 164.7 GB SATA 1 drive that was manufactured in 2004 that came out of a server that was given to me that has over 50,000 hours of use on it and it keeps working, however I don't give it the level of trust that I would a lesser operating mileage drive, so I use it as a drive for low risk data. Additionally this drive shows up as a ! WARNING ! to CrystalDiskInfo because it has some bad sectors, but the bad sector count hasn't increased in the 4 years that i have been using the drive since getting it for free and so maybe the server when running before i got it took a bump or something that caused the platter to get scratched in a spot creating permanent damage, but not cause the drive to continue to degrade.

I use to run RAID 1 with a RAID Controller card for hardware RAID. Windows supports a software RAID in drive management for Mirroring as well if your system doesnt have a built in RAID controller.

[camerongray]

Bear in mind that RAID shouldn't be considered the same as a backup.  It protects against hardware failure and is ideal for scenarios where uptime is important as a drive failure won't take down a machine however it provides no protection against files becoming corrupted or accidentally deleted.  There is no substitute to taking a complete backup to a disk that isn't permanently connected to the source machine.

[patio]

I have a Quantuum Bigfoot in my Win2K rig that's still hummin along...

[DaveLembke]

I agree with Cameron that Backups should still be completed copying important data to an alternate storage device. I should have stated as to why its not 100% guaranteed to not lose data with the examples of corruption/infection and accidental data deletion as why.  And true that a mirror is not a complete replacement to a good backup practice.

*Even Cloud storage alone isn't a good backup solution to prevent corruption and data loss as for when the cloud storage synchronizes with your system, it can inherit the problems from the system. However I have used my 15GB space to store backups which a backup process backs up data to a zip file with todays date and then there is a process of out with the old and in with the new for a rolling backup that happens locally that is then mirror copied to my 15GB Google Drive. I create a monthly backup to a DVD-R as well just in case the extremely rare but possibility of 7 large zip files getting trashed/corrupted making their way to the cloud storage data inheriting the bad changes as part of the mirror sync process.