lots of older hard drives, check to repurpose?

[westwood339]

Our business has gone through many computer builds which fail from age or other reasons. I've pulled all the hard drives from these old machines consisting of maxtor, western digital, seagates, size range from 80gb to 2TB. would like to build back up computers that control our cnc machines out of the these spare drives running windows7.

How do i go about check these old drives for errors and life expectancy?

Do I just use Seatools under windows for all drives? I've run seatools on some seagate drives in an external usb enclosure hooked up to my windows7 machine. from memory these drives had very little use and they are all failing their tests:
Fix all short: fail @100%
Fix all long: fail @ 100%
Short drive self test: Pass 100%
Short Generic: fail @ 0%
Long Generic: fail @ 100%
This drive would be no good??

Or simply use windows checkdisk?
Or do I learn to use Crystal Disk or HDTune? These are more accurate?
Do maxtor and Wd have their own tools? how reliable are they?

 

[Layback Bear]

Most places that have cnc machines need them to be fully operational and precise.
Down time because of reused old hardware, will not make the boss happy.
Considering the price of a ssd or hard drive.

I would suggest not using old hardware.

When you use a tool to test your drive and it finds problem, I recommend not using them. My rule of the thumb is; If in doubt throw them out.

If you test the drives and they pass. That only tells you it's okay at that moment.
The drive could go belly up the next day.
Even new drives can only last a short time. Sometime a new drive won't work right out of the box.
I know of no test that will tell you how long a hard drive will last.

Jack