How to check that drive is really OK?

2

I have several (around 10) Seagate drives, some older and smaller (80GB, 160GB) some newer and larger (1.5 TB, etc). I wanted to check which one is still in good health - and I installed SeaTools for Windows.

When I choose Long Test, which should work by reading all sectors, all drives check out. If I choose "Long Test and Fix All", sometimes the result is that drive is ok, sometimes (mostly) it says that that disk is unrecoverable - this happens randomly with all tested disks, Long Test is ok, "Long Test and Fix All" sometimes fail, sometimes disk appears ok (with the same drive).

In the system (drive manager), drives are disabled, so they are accessed only by SeaTools. I thought that this kind of diagnostics should be quite consistent, and what's more, now I don't know how to realistically determine state of the drive. When I use Data Life Guard from WD, all tests are OK, SMART events are not tripped, but random behavior of SeaTools puzzles me.

I also tried SeaTools for DOS, where there is only option Long test and Full Erase. Again, all disks check out, but sometimes when I perform full erase (thus writing to all sectors), the software crashes with some drives.

Do you have similar experience? Or how how would you realistically determine state of the drive?

Robert Goldwein

Posted 2014-10-01T13:33:30.320

Reputation: 248

Answers

2

I would run a (destructive) read-write test from linux.

Consult the man page for all options, or run badblocks -v -s -w -t 0xff -t 0x00 /dev/sdb. It will leave the disk overwritten with 0 when its done.

tlund

Posted 2014-10-01T13:33:30.320

Reputation: 600

I come from Windows world, so I'd prefer a little bit a Windows Application, but some CD-bootable linux edition seems to be a viable option, I'll consider that, thank you. – Robert Goldwein – 2014-10-01T15:04:46.600

Asked: 2014-10-01T13:33:30.320

Viewed: 166 times

Active: 2014-10-01T13:48:30.743