Do you check new hard drives for reliability/issues?

[gevorg]

How? Or you just plug-and-play to see if it "works", then its all good.

 

[Voo]

Zerofilling it once or twice before using it should find most bad drives that would usually go bad in ~2 weeks (especially annoying for members of a RAID)

With linux you can just use something like:
dd if=/dev/zero of=<drive>

and I assume there are some similar windows apps that do the same out there as well.

 

[corkyg]

Been pluggin' and playin' since 1982. Haven't had a failure yet. I always have them 100&#37; duplicated - so there's really no concern.

 

[Nothinman]

I generally run bonnie++ on the thing for a day or two before putting any real data on it.

 

[Emulex]

always its checking more than the drive. the unit as a whole. cables/power/etc.

externals:
full format (no quickie) takes a day or two.
then push random zipped data to full
check zip/rar crc's
repeat

48 hours at least.

 

[Modelworks]

There are two schools of thought on HD burn ins. One says test it and if any part is weak it will fail. The other says there is no need and all you are doing is adding wear and shortening the life of the drive.

Just doing a scan for bad sectors is pointless because that was done at the factory.
Full format looking for failures is also a waste of time.
The only real test is torture testing and it takes a very long time to run , generates a lot of heat and noise.

 

[capeconsultant]

Sure do. By backing them up!

 

[RebateMonger]

I run a "chkdsk /r" or two and, if I have time, will copy several hundred gigabytes of data.

Any files of importance to me are backed up a couple of different places.

 

[taltamir]

There are two schools of thought on HD burn ins. One says test it and if any part is weak it will fail. The other says there is no need and all you are doing is adding wear and shortening the life of the drive.

Just doing a scan for bad sectors is pointless because that was done at the factory.
Full format looking for failures is also a waste of time.
The only real test is torture testing and it takes a very long time to run , generates a lot of heat and noise.

I have had brand new drives fail on me during a full format, or transfering a little data (less than 50&#37; of drive capacity), or just letting it spin for a few hours.
It is better than nothing, but torture test is nicer.

Also, since the factory it got placed in boxes of various reliability and shipped all over the world, getting pretty banged up in the process...

 

[Chaoticlusts]

I guess with all this you can reduce the odds of a new drive failure (granted by essentially forcing the failure but if that happens it would have happened later) but unless your willing to not use your new hard drive you payed for for quite a bit there are some aspects of the 'unreliable' first few months of a drive that can't be avoided....from what I understand a lot of the failure is due to small mechanical problems that to begin with don't cause any issues but sometime in the first few months may well do something that damages the drive hense why hard drives tend to either fail in the first few months or after several years...I've had one new drive failure in all the time i've used computers...and it happened about 2 months in...I don't think it would have been avoided by filling and wiping the drive (though I can't be sure)..I think it was just a matter of the drive running for long enough for the manufacturing faults to really present themselves (that drive was used a lot in those 2 months)

....I maybe entirely wrong on this I don't have a IT degree or anything i'm just a casual user with some knowledge of how things work and spend my life on computers...this is just what i've come to understand overtime so please take it with a grain of salt

 

[Seven]

There is no such a thing as HDD burn in time. All methods are pointless and useless.

 

[Emulex]

^^ you assume the factory invests the time to relloac all sectors for you. now that would be a waste of time.

 

[Voo]

I have had brand new drives fail on me during a full format, or transfering a little data (less than 50% of drive capacity), or just letting it spin for a few hours.
It is better than nothing, but torture test is nicer

Yeah, I had more than one drive failing while zerofilling them and I can't remember even one failing ~2 weeks in use, so I'd wager zerofilling it does find most bad drives.. at least for me.

@Seven: And you're claiming that based on what exactly?

 

[Modelworks]

I have had brand new drives fail on me during a full format, or transfering a little data (less than 50% of drive capacity), or just letting it spin for a few hours.
It is better than nothing, but torture test is nicer.

Also, since the factory it got placed in boxes of various reliability and shipped all over the world, getting pretty banged up in the process...

Shipping should not harm a hard drive unless it is seriously mishandled. The heads park when the drive is powered down .
Hard drives are not as fragile as some people think. The mechanical parts are very well designed. Just about every hard drive failure is either the heads or on the circuit board. Rarely is it the mechanical parts.

The things like clicking that people attribute to being something mechanical wrong isn't that at all. It is a controller failure sweeping the heads too fast trying to locate the sectors and overshooting into the parking area, that is the clank or click people hear. Basically it is banging the servo arm with the heads against the stop point.

 

[taltamir]

Shipping should not harm a hard drive unless it is seriously mishandled.

Have you ever seen how shipping companies handle boxes? And how poorly etailers are packaging drives?

 

[hclarkjr]

when i buy new drive i always check the SMART readings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. to see if they all say passed and transfer bunch of stuff on and off it looking for errors.

 

[Bish]

I usually run a full manufacturer diag on it including a full scan. I've had two drives in umpteen years (20+) and easily over 100 hard drives fail out of the box.

 

[Zap]

Have you ever seen how shipping companies handle boxes? And how poorly etailers are packaging drives?

E-tailers are getting better. Both Tiger Direct and Newegg have upgraded their packaging in the past year.

 

[Tsavo]

All the drives I ordered from Newegg in the last year came bubble wrapped in a box filled with packing peanuts.

 

[RebateMonger]

E-tailers are getting better. Both Tiger Direct and Newegg have upgraded their packaging in the past year.

Re: Tiger Direct - What packaging?

 

[AlgaeEater]

How? Or you just plug-and-play to see if it "works", then its all good.

As funny as this sounds - I check the WARRANTY on the drive is valid before anything else. Since I mostly deal with Western Digital drives, a one stop to the warranty checker after I get a new drive is all I need to do make sure I have what I paid for. If something goes wrong with the drive - a simple click, print and ship will get a new one on the way.

Over the years I've accumulated too many drives, so I can't really "run out" of places to put things somewhere. So even if a drive fails; I more than likely have that data backed up to another drive OR the data was outdated and pretty much nothing I hardly used anyway.

This is all speaking strictly from a home user in a non critical enviroment of course.

 

[Rifter]

I zero fill the drives twice then fill them to max capacity twice then at the end do a full format. Have found 10 or so drives over the years that died during this process, the only ones over the last 2 years to die while "burning in" were a seagate 7200.12 500GB and a WD black 1TB. I would much rather know about it within a few days that have it die possibly with vital not backed up info on it a few weeks later.

 

[taltamir]

All the drives I ordered from Newegg in the last year came bubble wrapped in a box filled with packing peanuts.

HDD manufacturers void your warranty if you use peanuts to ship it to them for an RMA because peanuts generate static electricity that damages the (exposed) controller board.

 

[corkyg]

All HDDs I have received over the past several years have been shipped in a small foam box. The drive is in a static proof bag inside the foam box. That in turn is packed into a shipping cardboard box surrounded by disposable plastic airbags. No peanuts involved. They are messy and can shift around. Bottom line? I've never had a bad drive delivered.

 

[taltamir]

All HDDs I have received over the past several years have been shipped in a small foam box. The drive is in a static proof bag inside the foam box. That in turn is packed into a shipping cardboard box surrounded by disposable plastic airbags. No peanuts involved. They are messy and can shift around. Bottom line? I've never had a bad drive delivered.

this is the correct way to ship a drive...
I have gotten drives packed very poorly compared to this. (worst was where the drive is touching the bottom of the box with some brown PAPER crumpled around it to limit its movement, but not enough of it to even keep it from moving... this was from newegg btw)