Hard drive benchmarking program?

[shG]

Hi, I just bought a retail SATAII 500gb drive from circuit city for $95. I thought it was a decent deal, but now I'm concerned, because when I bought it, it was the last drive and it on the WRONG shelf.

Anyways, I'm concerned that this drive is damaged, are there any programs I can use to check my hard drive speed and health?

On a side note: What are the advantages to paritioning a drive(if there are any)? I heard running the main OS on such a big hard drive isn't good. Would it help if I paritioned this drive? or should I go buy a low storage drive to run my OS?

 

[jbmx4life]

Go to the manufacturers website and look for the diagnostics software they provide (usually free). Alot of people use HDTach to check the throughput of the drives. Yes you can run partitions just fine. I run a 250GB and have the first 40GB or so running my OS and have a few other partitions for programs install files, downloads, ect.