[Veltliner]

Repeatedly I have read that some people test their newly purchased hard drives for bad sectors.

They fill them up, and run some kind of a testing software (seatools for seagate, but what do you do with a Hitachi drive?).

Is this a recommended procedure, or is it over the top?

[Nivag]

It's always worth making sure you can backup data to a drive and then test that it can be recovered/usable. You should also be doing this as a regular test. Just so you can confirm that your backups are working fine.

You can use TechTool Pro to test to see if the drive is OK. Personally i format and copy/test data, then reformat before using any drive.

[Big Mac]

I don't really think that's necessary. If there are serious problems, you'll certainly see them when you go to copy data over.

[Veltliner]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

I don't really think that's necessary. If there are serious problems, you'll certainly see them when you go to copy data over.

You mean, that when you are backing up and the drive has bad sectors, you'd already notice?

To be on the safe side I bought a really good high end external drive for my most important data.

[rjt1000]

I would suggest formatting a new drive with your OS X disk utility, rather than going with the format as supplied by the drive manufacturer.

Maybe overkill, but if you want to test every sector (and you have some time to spare), you can write zeros to every sector (security options in the erase tab of disk utility). If bad sectors are found, they should be mapped out (i.e. those sectors will be ignored).

[hab]

Originally Posted by rjt1000 

... If bad sectors are found, they should be mapped out (i.e. those sectors will be ignored).

Can anyone confirm this. I have an old external hard drive that I use for a SuperDuper mirror. Recently, it has begun to hang at a certain point in the backup. I do not own any of the utilities (TechTool, etc.) and would just as soon buy a new drive mechanism instead of a $100 piece of software that will tell me to replace the drive. But if zeroing the drive gets me down the road then all the better...

[rjt1000]

Originally Posted by rjt1000 

Maybe overkill, but if you want to test every sector (and you have some time to spare), you can write zeros to every sector (security options in the erase tab of disk utility). If bad sectors are found, they should be mapped out (i.e. those sectors will be ignored).

Originally Posted by hab 

Can anyone confirm this. I have an old external hard drive that I use for a SuperDuper mirror. Recently, it has begun to hang at a certain point in the backup. I do not own any of the utilities (TechTool, etc.) and would just as soon buy a new drive mechanism instead of a $100 piece of software that will tell me to replace the drive. But if zeroing the drive gets me down the road then all the better...

Sorry, researching this further, I see I gave you outdated information. Low level formatting seems to be a thing of the past. Apparently modern hard drives are constantly scouting for bad sectors and replacing them with spare sectors transparently, on-the-fly. By the time the OS or disk utility is reporting bad sectors, it means that the pool of spare sectors is exhausted. Disk utility's "write zeros" to all sectors is now just a secure erase feature.

So hab, I think you would be best to use Disk utility's First aid function, or a disk repair utility. If you find you have a hardware issue, then I agree your best bet is to just replace the drive.

[hab]

Yeah. I tried the write zero thing which actually completed so I was encouraged. However, the Disk Utility gave red flags on verify and hung during the repair. So I fear my drive is toast. Oh well. Thanks for your followup nonetheless.