Solved Need Advice On A Questionable Hard Drive Situation

[Mulsiphix]

I purchased two refurbished hard drives ($120 total, link). This was a couple months ago and there were very few bad reviews. I installed them yesterday and went back to check the reviews. Now 19 of the 76 ratings are a 1 out of 5. People report the drives failing within weeks or them arriving with a ton of bad sectors. So I wanted to check the health of the drives.

I tried to run Hitachi DOS diagnostic tool. It improperly reported the drive size and would time out when I tried to run any kind of test.

Samsung SeaTools for DOS reported it timed out when I tried to do a surface test. It followed that by telling me that the drive is going to likely fail and to backup my stuff and claim the warranty. When I tried to do the normal read and write tests, it reported that the drive doesn't support them.

Under Windows 7 I checked the hard drive with CrystalDiskInfo. Reports it is perfectly healthy.

I then ran Hard Disk Sentinel and it reported the drives were healthy. I tried to run a surface test and it just hangs there forever. When I try to run the Self-Test, it reports that the drive does not support this function. When I run the 2 minute Random Seek Test, it completes normally with no errors.

Partition Magic will actually start a Surface Test on the volume. But, it reports that it will take 4000+ hours to finish. That's around 165 days. After two hours, three of the 100's of little boxes were actually marked green. Either way, it seemed to be taking way longer than I'd expect. After some Googling it looks like anything over 24 hours is considered too long.

I found a Western Digital diagnostic tool and set it to run before bed last night. This is it's current progress. The website says that an extended scan on a large drive can take several hours. As you can see, the scan on this drive would take hundreds of days.

I tried Macrorit Disk Scanner and 40 minutes later it had yet to start tracking how much time had elapsed or how much was left. It appears to be hanging like several other drive diagnostic software.

These are HGST drives. I got a copy of WinDFT, the drive diagnostic tool supplied by HGST, and right on the program it states that HGST is a Western Digital company. Sadly the WinDFT tool does not even report any drives. Tried it on two separate PC's and had the same results.

I've read several of the 5 Egg reviews on NewEgg for this drive, and people continually mention running scans on the drive successfully. One stated that he was able to run an entire surface scan in around 6h 20m. So I'm really beginning to think that my drive is simply a brick, despite the fact it powers on, can be partitioned, formatted, and have files put on and off of it. Many people stand by these drives though several people report that the DOA chance is around 1 in 4 for these drives. Though in all cases I saw the drives that were DOA simply would not show up in the PC at all.

I just don't know much about HD technology so I have no idea if I should keep with these drives or just toss them in the trash. For example, I can run an Extensive Random Seek Test with Hard Disk Sentinel. If it produces no errors, is that enough? Is that scanning for bad sectors? I'd imagine a surface test is necessary but I just can't find any software that will successfully run on it. Any thoughts on if I should continue trying to test the drives would be greatly appreciated.

I was able to use Partition Magic to make it a GPT volume and made three Logical partitions. They formatted fine and I can put files on them. But I'm afraid to move 5TB of data onto them now, given the reviews, my inability to figure out how to scan them for bad sectors, and the 24% of user reviews stating to avoid these drives like the plague.

Is there any way that I can scan these drives? Perhaps other software you might recommend? Are there any DOS style general Hard Drive diagnostic software that I might use to scan this drive? Should I be worried by any of the information I learned from the various software I tried to test the drives with? Any feedback, suggestions, or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Megahertz07]

As it is a WD brand, use the WD diag toll Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support

 

[Megahertz07]

Sorry, seen that you already tried the WD tool.
I use this small program to test flash drives. H2testw Download
It will write small files to the disk and then read them. If they don't match, you have a problem.

 

[Mulsiphix]

Alright. After much searching I was able to find a general hard drive scanning program; HDDScan. It is free and it successfully scanned my drive. Based on what I am seeing, along with a successful Windows Chkdsk, I've decided to keep the drives for a couple of years. I'll continue to monitor them and run scans from time to time. Thank you for the responses ^_^

 

[Megahertz07]

Thank you for the feedback. Please mark this thread as solved.