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hard drive tools
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Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Maltby, WA.
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Before putting my valuable data on a new external hard drive, I would like to thoroughly and completely test it. What tools (any platform) would you suggest I look into?
TIA
MacOS
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Moderator  Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: San Jose, CA
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Test it for what? Drives fail: it's an unfortunate fact of life, and the only thing you can do is have a backup (Time Machine is good) or good drive tools (Disk Utility, Disk Warrior) that will let you get stuff off of them before they completely die. You can also try to get good quality drives to begin with.
Steve
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Celebrating 10 years and 4000 posts on MacNN!
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Nashua NH, USA
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Best you can do is use disk utility to zero out the drive and then look at the SMART data from the drive.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Maltby, WA.
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My bad. If you don't say want you mean then how can you expect others to know what you said.
I was thinking more along the lines of a scan for bad sectors.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Maltby, WA.
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Originally Posted by BLAZE_MkIV 
Best you can do is use disk utility to zero out the drive and then look at the SMART data from the drive.
How do I read the SMART data?
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
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Originally Posted by MacOS
How do I read the SMART data?
Disk Utility shows it. But only for SATA-connected drives. Drives connected through FW/USB don't show their SMART status in DU.
You can chose to write zeros first to force the disk to find any bad sectors and map them out, but IMHO that's a waste of time. Especially if you want to do it thoroughly.
I'd stick to Steve's advice. Buy a good disk and then make sure you have a good backup strategy. Every disk will die some day. You just want to make sure that doesn't happen too soon and that when it does you're well prepared.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Nashua NH, USA
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The point is to look at the list of bad sectors and if they're high for a new disk to return it and get a better one. That and some disk controllers will drop a drive if it takes to long to remap a bad sector.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Maltby, WA.
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Originally Posted by BLAZE_MkIV
The point is to look at the list of bad sectors and if they're high for a new disk to return it and get a better one. That and some disk controllers will drop a drive if it takes to long to remap a bad sector.
Exactly! I found this tool from PROSOFT. Drive Genius 2 can defragment a volume, analyze a volume and repair it if necessary. Its testing capability goes a few steps above other drive utilities with media surface scanning and long term data integrity checking. Drive Genius 2 can also measure the throughput of the drives to see if they are performing up to par.
Hope this helps!
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Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Wasilla, Alaska
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My opinion: Drive Genius sucks.
It reported no problems whatsoever with a drive that was completely failing.
(Disk Warrior correctly told me the drive was bad.)
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Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Maltby, WA.
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FWIW, there is a KB article @ TechTools that says Disk Utility will map out bad block IF you FIRST select the drive (not the partition\volume name) and Erase with the ZERO data option.
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