Hard Drive Reliability..

Kali

I've a number of spare drives I need to stress test basically for reliability (they were previously all marked as defective, yet several still work quite adequately).

Anyone reccomend any small (preferably free or shareware) software that will do the trick?

Cheers,
Ken

IronMan

Shareware here, don't know if its what you're after. http://www.ontrack.com/dataadvisor/. I used Spinrite from GRC.com on a FAT drive I had, and it was outstanding. Pricey though, even though a quick float around on Kazaa might throw up a few surprises.

leeroybrown

Most Drive manufacturers have their own Drive Test utilites on their sites. (I know from experience that IMB and Western Digital have them).

These should be able to run heavy duty tests on the manufacturers own drives at the very least.

Doing a *full* bad blocks test (with destructive -w option) under linux using the badblocks command on the drives might be another way to test them.

badblocks will allow the drives to be recursively tested until no error is found in a user specified number of passes.

EvilGeorge

Western digital use to do a program called Eztools which had various stuff inside. There was one for testing their drivers - dont know if it still exists , check their website ? Or any hdd manufacturers site.

SouperComputer

maxblast from maxtor is pretty handy, does a quikie, full and random seek test as well as LLF's. Works with all makes too

tman

afiak amidiag does the job pretty well, i think the demo has all the hd tests.

i downloaded the dos demo off of http://ami.com/ yesterday, can't seem to find it today tho