i have a couple of WD 2TB Red drives that i want to do extended tests on. The program tells me to close all programs that have files open on the drive being tested. But is it ok to still have Windows Explorer running? as i still want to be able to do other things while the test is being run.. est time to do the test is about 3hr 40m. was expecting longer as it took longer than that to do a full format.

Never used it, but would guess the program measures block response time, therefore the suggestion to avoid other disk activity, which can be misinterpreted as slow LBA.

For extended testing I'd suggest to go with HDDScan, which at least can do the same, but will show detailed results down to single LBA instead of a progress bar and a general conclusion afterwards.
Should you decide to look deeper into some (seemingly?) problematic area, you can re-scan it by defining a range instead of the whole drive analysis:
http://hddscan.com/

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in addition to Dmitri
i would say, is recommended to these kind of tests in pure dos

I didn't test myself, but unsure that each and every DOS utility handles large drives properly.

Generally I believe that connecting new drive as a secondary one and launching HDDScan as an only program after reboot should be enough for a regular user.

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

you right, didn't noticed that it's 2TB