Quick Hard Drive ?

[theprophet]

Ok I bought a couple cheap hard drives but I'm always paranoid when it comes to these things. What program should I use to scan them to make sure they don't have bad boot sectors and the health of the hdd is ok? I know that the manufacture makes diagnostic progs but I don't quite know if I trust them. Is there a good 3rd party that is good for multiple manufacturers? I got a couple Seagates and a Samsung drive. I wouldn't have bothered but the price was too good too turn down

[bork]

linux livecd - under the admin menu, you can play with a few of the utilities to look at a hard drives health.


I use:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

[kureshii]

1) Scandisk is fine if all you want to do is scan for bad sectors. For drive health, any SMART monitoring tool is fine.
2) Yeah, those diagnostic progs are likely trustworthy, provided you're not talking about firmware-flashing utilities and the like.
3) If you're really paranoid, use RAID and keep regular backups. Don't just pray the drive will live longer than the warranty period.

Also, why is this thread titled "Quick Hard Drive"?

[vuzedome]

Dump hard drives, go solid state.

[fohfoh]

Dump hard drives, go solid state.

That's still a hard drive no?

[namaiki]

^

dump mechanical hard drives~

[Tiffanys]

Yeah... why the hell is the thread called "Quick Hard Drive?"

Well, if it's for anime you probably want a lot of space, so you'd want a 1TB HDD (Last I heard, the larger ones are less reliable). I don't know a lot about brands, but Western Digital has really good RMA service. You can do an advanced RMA and they ship you the new HDD before you have to send in the old one. So, as soon as you know one's failing you can do an advanced RMA, clone your old hdd to the new one and send them the old one and you have your replacement for free.

I use Acronis TrueImage for direct copies of hdd's. If you do that, you can just clone it, then pull the old one out and plug the new one where the old one was and it's like nothing ever happened.

If you want a "quick" hard drive... Then you want something like a Raptor or a SSD. But, those are a lot more expensive (especially SSD), and get to monstrous prices at higher sizes. They aren't generally for storage though... they'd be for running your system and you'd have other larger (not as fast) hdd's for storage.

[sapsa]

Few times i had alot of errors from SMART etc. programs. What was it about ? - Producent claim that its error from using 3th part programs for scaning. Using that producent program didnt give any errors. So remamber about this scaning your HDD dont panic when you see ERRORZ - read about them

[flyawave]

Solid State drive are SERIOUSLY expensive

[Jarudin]

Solid State drive are SERIOUSLY expensive

So were hard disks, 20 years ago

If you're uncertain about he quality of the disks (and they're cheap) you should consider putting them in RAID 1 or 5. Might cost a buck for a controller but at least your data will be safe(r).

--Jarudin--

[Lupin]

Also, why is this thread titled "Quick Hard Drive"?

Quick Hard Drive ? (question)

IBM/Hitachi's hard disk tool works on all brands of drives

[Tiffanys]

Also, I hear a certain popular model of the the WD Caviar Black has RAID disabled (they didn't before, but newer ones do). So, research before you buy.

[kureshii]

Also, I hear a certain popular model of the the WD Caviar Black has RAID disabled (they didn't before, but newer ones do). So, research before you buy.

There used to be a firmware flash for the Caviars that sets the TLER flag; this setting is good in RAID setups, where the controller handles error correction and recovery, but not for normal single-drive use.

The firmware has since been pulled. I'm guessing they didn't want to cannibalise their "RAID edition" RE-GP product line, but in any case the drives are still good to use in RAID; the TLER flag does not affect one's ability to use the drive in a RAID.

[theprophet]

Sorry for the absence Work kept me slammed this week..

Quick hard Drive ? .. Correct me if I am wrong but ? also stands for question in the texting and quick type world. Sorry for the confusion I should have typed out the word.



I would LOVE 3 2TB solid state hard drives... But seeing as in the question I stated I was buying Cheap I don't have the budget for that build right now. Once Solid States come down in price I will of course go that route.


These drives are bought I don't need to know what to buy. They were seagates... (( Yes I know they suck)) but they were only $110 so I can take a chance since all the data is backed up on externals. and they came with warrenty so if they crap out no data lost. Thought it would be the cheap solution until I get the money to buy some nice WD or solid state if they ever get cheap enough..

I'm really looking for a hard drive utility to monitor the health of these seagates as they are known to crap out. I have the SeaGate utility but don't know that I trust sea gate as much as I did in decades past.

[HiddenJumper]

I use Speedfan to monitor fan speed, heat and it comes with a SMART utility so I can check the health of my HDD as well.