faulty used hard drives - help!

[kdoggy]

Hi all,

I have a couple of windows 7 PCs that I've been backing up. In addition to using cloud backup I needed some physical backups, and needed 1TB of storage. Having not bought HDD drives in a while, I expected the prices to have come down over the last 5 years - but they seem about the same as last time I looked!

So I figured I would buy a couple of used/second hand HDDs off ebays, to save some money. I bought two (different makes and different sellers), yet both have shown the same behaviour. Able to copy some data to them but they show very intermittent and unreliable behaviour, such that I do not trust them to hold my backups. They appear and disappear in Win 7, they often fail to read and I can't seem to restore data off them reliably.

Now I can't get a refund unless I send the drives back - but I have no desire to send them back with my data on! And I do not feel confident trying to format them given their erratic behaviour.

Any suggestions? Just keep them as faulty and buy brand new replacement HDDs?

 

[Alejandro85]

Given the situation, your best choice is to wipe the disk (and hope it doesn't dies there) and send it back without any personal data. Keeping the disk as it is is risk, specially for a backup, as drives showing random failures often exhibit more severe failures in the near future. Simply keeping them collecting dust means losing their value immediately too.

Windows 7 includes a rudimentary way of cleaning the disk securely of all data. Look at this tutorial for some indications on this. If it finishes without errors, it's safe to assume that the disk contains no trace of your data, and can be send to the seller for a refund without serious privacy compromise.

 

[Megahertz07]

Used drives are from disassembled computers.
You can see its health with this program. https://osdn.net/frs/redir.php?m=c3sl&f=/crystaldiskinfo/65980/CrystalDiskInfo7_0_5Shizuku.zip

In what kind of case did you put them in?

 

[RolandJS]

Another option: create, boot, the famous DBAN usb or dvd. Once booted, once started, it should eliminate any data anywhere on those suspect HDs -- give them unique names! DBAN must be "aimed" at the right HDs, or consequences may be quite harsh.