Is there a hard drive burn-in utility?

[Modelworks]

The only other thing I can recommend is to download something like everest ultimate and read the smart values on the drive, see if any are questionable.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Blain
Fresh drive - Quick format
Used drive - Full format

I would say that the opposite is true (well id seriously test both actually). A fresh drive is more likely to have a fatal defect causing it to die in agony right away. A used drive has worked fine for a while, so it will continue to work fine for a while. (unless it was sold because its full of errors and fails smart, in which case someone knowingly sold you a defective drive)

 

[joea]

One of the commercial programs that does do the burn in the way you want is SpinRite from GRC. It can also help recover flaky sectors, but we use it to fully test a drive before putting it into a server. These days, we run the maintenance test just once since we never saw drives fail during re-testing.

 

[Mfusick]

Is it worth it to "burn in". ?

Why bother at all?

 

[RU482]

anvil disk utilities

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I use Seagate Seatools. It's free and works on any drive. It has a full set of rigorous tests that will tell you if your drive *has* problems. There's no way to test your drive to see if it will have problems *in two months*.

If a drive can survive full diagnostic testing with Seatools or something similar, then you can have at least some assurance that it won't develop a problem in the short term. But as was mentioned, a "burn-in" process is probably more likely to actually be the *cause* of your drive failing because you over-stressed it and it broke, when just using it normally would never have caused it to fail.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

WinDLG or HGST. Basically do a couple of sector scans, maybe a zero fill.
It's what I always do with an unproven / unfamiliar drive before committing any actual data to it.

Helps to weed out infant mortality.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Full format does not do what people think it does. Full format erases the file table for where the files begin and end, then tries to read each sector. It does not erase the data. Remember that when you share flash drives or hard drives with friends.

The best test I can think of is to download the drive tools from the manufacturer and run their long test or surface scan.

In Windows 7 (and Vista?) it supposedly writes zeros to every sector when you do an NTFS full format. It was XP and earlier that full formats just did a read-verify pass, and then a filesystem quick-format.

 

[lakedude]

Iometer will work but can be a pain to set up.

For PSU the OCCT PSU tester alongside with Prime95 small FFT gets things going. (Prime alongside seems to get the draw higher when more than 4 threads are required.)

I've got a Kill-a-watt that we were trying to max out. IIRC overloading the CPU made it draw less current because it starved the GPU. Seems like we set affinities or somehow gave the GPU access to more CPU power to really get it cooking.

 

[bryanl]

HDAT2 has a read/rewrite test.

HDDscan can do regular sequential scans and also 'butterfly' scans.

 

[Elixer]

Nothing like replying to a ~4 year old thread!

 

[bononos]

.....

When they test hard drive MTBF they don't do it by continuous head activity 24/7, but by simulating what a normal use for the drive would be. I could see how running a drive with constant activity might cause failures that otherwise would not occur.
.....

What test do they substitute for real world reliability/lifetime? Do they run it at high temps or something?

 

[Rakehellion]

Basically, I want a program that I can use to burn in a new hard disk so I can return it if its bound to break in a month or something

What if it breaks in two months?

A test like this is pretty counterintuitive, as it only reduces the life of your drive rather than predict the future.

 

[icanhascpu2]

Nothing like replying to a ~4 year old thread!

Who cares, its still relevant. We live in the age of Google. Threads like this come up on search results (this one was one of the top 5 results) and people still adding to it IS HELPFUL.


Sis Sandra software has a lot of good tools for HDD burnin as well.

 

[icanhascpu2]

What if it breaks in two months?

A test like this is pretty counterintuitive, as it only reduces the life of your drive rather than predict the future.

Incorrect. Tests like this do not reduce the life of the drive in any meaningful way; no more than stressing a CPU when testing overclock stability. They have a hugely useful utility of finding out of any flaw or vulnerability that would not be found till after RMA is up due to not getting to parts of the drive with the weakness/fault in them. Stressing components to root out flaws is one of the most important steps in any electronic business, from IT to flash chips. Even then some flawed ones do get through. A last stress on a consumer end is what ANY intelligent consumer does to a newly bought or product they are investing in. To not do so based on ridiculous, made up and baseless reasoning is careless and naive. It's alright to be lazy, It isn't alright to mislead others in an attempt to justify your own laziness.

Please, NEVER work for QA in any company if that is your mentality.

 

[Tsavo]

I need something to burn in my USB 3 cables.

:hmm:

 

[icanhascpu2]

I need something to burn in my USB 3 cables.

:hmm:

Ill do it