checking health of hard drives

[supernova777]

so..
you have a bunch of hard drives lying around and u want to put them to use..
whats the best way to check old drives to make sure they are still "ok" and in good health?

is there any apps that can give a percentage or rating of the health of a hard drive?

[Xernicus]

I have plugged in my Mac hard drives to my PC and used Hard Disk Sentinel, but that's just when I had worries (I don't want to bend/break any of the pins!).

Alternatively, one could use Target Disk Mode and connect to a computer running OS X, or boot from an OS X CD to see if the Disk Utility SMART status reads "verified". There are also some Universal Binary programs which provide more detailed information.

But I do not believe there is a way to use SMART in OS 9 unless someone wrote a driver.

[supernova777]

yeah im not concerned with doing the actual checking on mac os 9 only...
i just want to know that the drives im using are not going to die in a few days
or have some type of damage already!

[Xernicus]

Well the easiest way to do that would probably be to do a surface scan, which I know TechTool Pro does. I have unfortunately had some bad experiences with it lately though, so I can't vouch for it. 

As for sectors reallocating, I/O errors, and motor health, just listen to it. Clicking, new whining, slow spin-up, etc. But SMART data is the most comprehensive way to check those values.

[TRI]

I think the main thing that screws up is the bearing the thing spins on.  Sorta primitive but if you have the hard drive running outside of the computer and hold it up to your ear you can listen to it.  I've lots of hard drives that Disk Utility says are fine fail.

Hard drives run at such a high RPM it's a wonder that they last as long as they do.  Like probably most people on this site,I have a box of old hard drives.  Some dinosaurs like 4 GB units.  I wouldn't trust any of those suckers.  I'd wipe them and instal an os and use them for sure, but whenever I work I save every few minutes and every few hours copy the last saved version to a flash drive and second hard drive.  I try and save lots and lots of versions on a multitude of hard drives.  I wouldn't trust any used, or even new hard drive all that much, I'd plan on them failing.  I trust flash drives way more because they don't spin.

[supernova777]

which app can i use in mac os 9 to do some checks on a drive im not sure of the status of?
i forget if these drives are close to failure or not

diskwarrior? is for this?

[supernova777]

ok i checked on one of my pro tools instalation disks and found this program
"ExpressPro-Tools" by ATTO

its allowing me to benchmark my drives

under the utilities file menu theres options for
creating RAID0 + RAID1 volumes..
but its greyed out. i guess because this is a "express" or "lite" version of these ATTO tools...

http://web.archive.org/web/20011211174229/http://www.attotech.com/protools.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20011211174229/http://www.attotech.com/software/files/manuals/Protools.pdf

does anyone have the full version of this app?
http://web.archive.org/web/20011005111013/http://www.attotech.com/expraid.html
i guess this is it?