HDD testing

K

Krita

n00b
Joined
Feb 28, 2012
Messages
5
hi all,

just chasing a bit of advice, I'm building a pc for my dads business that's only going to be used maybe 5 hrs a week. but those few hours I'd really like to keep it running and data loss protection is paramount. so asside from backups after every session I'm setting it.up with raid mirroring, my question is what do you guys use to run New HDD through their paces and prove to the best of your ability they aren't bad from the factory?

on a side note is there anything in addition to my list youd recommend after a new build to prove reliability?

memtestx86 for 24 hrs
prime95 for 24hrs
Intel burn test for a couple of passes

thanks in advance
krita
 
At minimum look at the SMART data for problems with a program like CrystalDiskInfo. However it would be better if you read and wrote to every single sector a few times before running CrystalDiskInfo.

For users that are at least semi comfortable with the linux shell and know how to figure out what drive is what device in linux I recommend running a 4 pass destructive (to the data that is on the disk) badblocks test. You will find badblocks on any distributions live cd.

For windows users who are scared by this make sure you do a full format or several before running CrystalDiskInfo. This will write to every sector and at least verify that at the time of the format the heads are working. If the drive has any problem with either of these tests it will log this information in the SMART which are a set of statistics that all sata drives keep.
 
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