Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives?

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Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives?

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 23, 2012 @05:22AM from the just-bite-the-corner-a-little dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Any Slashdot thread about drive failure is loaded with good advice about EOL — but what about the beginning? Do you normally test your new purchases as thoroughly as you test old, suspect drives? Has your testing followed the proverbial 'bathtub' curve of a lot of early failures, but with those that survive the first month surviving for years? And have you had any return problems with new failed drives, because you re-partitioned it, or 'ran Linux,' or used stress-test apps?"

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Heh by Deekin_Scalesinger · 2012-12-23 05:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

Like, never. Out of the box and away she goes...good luck to thee!

--
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
1. Re:Heh by JMJimmy · 2012-12-23 06:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Add to the above:
  HDD tools are useless. I recently tried a bunch of them - they all reported my HDD in perfect condition... while it was doing the click of death. HDD failed within a week.
Re:SSDs by roc97007 · 2012-12-23 05:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

> Who cares about HDDs anymore these days?
Anyone with a need for a massive amount of storage space.

--
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wrong Approach by nuckfuts · 2012-12-23 08:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

I've been dealing with hardware failures for 20+ years. What I've learned is that disasters WILL happen, regardless of what preventive measures are in place. So I shifted my focus toward recoverablity. To me, the important question is "When something catastrophic happens, how quickly and easily can I put things back in working order"?
Since I use RAID where appropriate, and more importantly, I am positively fanatic about frequent, full, and tested backups, the only concern I have when a hard drive dies is whether I'm still entitled to a warranty replacement.