[Gamoe]

I've had an internal 80 GB IDE hard drive in storage for a while. I suspect I had had problems with it before and that's why I stopped using it, but I don't exactly remember anymore. The thing is, I've been needing some extra hard drive room recently.

I dusted off the hard drive, connected it to a LaCie Firewire enclosure and mounted it on the desktop. I zeroed all data and ran Diskwarrior on it. Everything seems to check out. But are there any other tests I can run that will give me reasonable assurance that the drive is good? And in that case, how could I distinguish between a problem with the enclosure and the actual hard drive?

[GORDYmac]

If DiskWarrior is in your login items, it runs a SMART check on the drive at login. If the drive failed this check, you would be notified. This SMART check is an internal test built into the drive, to alert users of malfunctions before the drive dies. DiskWarrior is one af a few apps that will monitor this. I'm not at my Mac now, but review the DiskWarrior docs for more information.

[peeb]

Drives are not that expensive - if you value your data, I would toss the drive, and buy a new one. If you relegated it to the closet, it was probably for a reason. But hey, I'm pretty conservative about these things.

[ecking01]

You can use it for temporary data storage, but unless you trust the hell out of it, don't use it for stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere.