I was given a job lot of hard drives 300Gb, 500GB, and 1TB drives. I need help on an easy way to test them all to see if they're working. I really cannot be bothered to stick them in my main rig and fire them up one by one. the only other thing I have is the mATX system in my other thread. Any way of testing their health without an OS?
Not really, personally I'd use a cheap caddy and just have it open while testing for quicker in and outs
Download the Hirens CD. That has all the relevant HDD manufacturers diagnostics testing tools and more than likely the tools to secure erase them.
No, but you can easily boot from a Linux Live CD installed on a USB stick to make use of your spare system. If your box supports hotplug, you're golden: you won't even need to reboot to swap drives. There's a list of Live CDs that include the excellent TestDisk utility here, or you could rely purely on the SMART output via something like 'smartctl --all /dev/sdX' as root. Bosh.
I use an external dock, you can get cheap ones too, for dealing with hard drives usually for data recovery. For testing there are a number of pieces of free software available I use HDtune and I'm sure there is a free version.
This is a Bad Idea, at least if you're talking about connecting via USB: a USB-connected hard drive cannot transfer SMART information to the host operating system, except in very limited numbers of expensive docks. You could have a million about-to-fail pending sectors, and you'd never know. Either connect them to SATA port or use an eSATA dock; never USB.
If you've got time, boot from a live linux CD/USB_drive and use badblocks on each of them like this: badblocks -v -B -w -s /dev/sdX This will of course wipe it completely and test reads and writes. Also, like Gareth said, check the SMART details. Look for reallocated sectors and other such errors.
don't suppose anyone would be interested in these HD's? I have little patience left with this stuff lol
I have the USB 3 version of this which works quite well for quick hard drive testing as you can quickly swap them out and check drive health without rebooting. Edit: How many of them are there? I'm a little interested.
