Best utility to check external hard drives

[robertdbuckley]

Hi,

I´m looking for a utility that will test external HDs of different brands. I must admit I don´t know a lot about disks, but would like to just scan the ones I do have to get an idea if they are worthy of holding my backup data.

Thanks for any tips,

Rob

[dmarques]

Hi,

They all do more or less the same.
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofth ... hddiag.htm

But IMHO I don't think that will tell you much regarding safety.

[HaQue]

I agree, tools may tell you file transfer speed, identify bottlenecks or some tests may show up other performance metrics, but no tool is going to show you which hard disk are going to fail. a much better idea is to plan out your storage with a sensible RAID and backup system so that a drive going down won't matter as much. If you think about it, you can only really see a pattern of failing drives after a lengthy amount of time, say for arguments sake, 6 months. so you know what drives are failing a lot, it doesn't help you at all because who takes metrics of stable solid drives? and even if you could work off the data available, are you going to purchase 6 month old drives?

Drives will be dropped, be subjected to bad power, will have firmware issues, fail for "no" reason etc... extremely hard to plan for.

It looks like you actually want to test drives yourself. Are you going to buy a heap of new ones and test? seems an expensive way to go for not a lot of garauntee.

My 2c

[robertdbuckley]

OK...I get it!

Better to just plan for the worst and hope for the best!

Cheers,

Rob

[Touchclarity]

The Atola Bandura is a pretty robust tool for Erasing / Testing and Re mapping bad sectors...... I use mine EVERY day..... mainly for sanitizing my target drives, but it's also great to run initial PCB / Head and firmware tests on potential donor drives.

I know it's slightly off topic..... But I like it!!

[HaQue]

yes you are right, plan for the worst. I get your mindset, as it seems logical but the factors that are critical are not really measurable in any useful way - until after the fact.

I guess if you had a stack of hard disks and you wanted to pick a subset of them to use as backup drives, you COULD use software to pick out the reported best ones, and that would be a sensible thing to do, but that doesn't look like your scenario.

all the best, cheers