Quickly/efficiently test laptop harddrives

[artois7]

Hi all,

I've recently come into around 100 laptop harddrives, between 40gb - 750gb. I haven't decided what to do with them yet, I'm thinking sell them. I've done a SMART test on a few of them, but is there a piece of software I can use to reliably determine if a drive is in good enough condition to sell, without taking 6+ hours to scan the whole surface and do write tests etc etc per drive?

Any ideas would be great!

Dan

[lezsimply]

Re: Quickly/efficiently test laptop harddrives

We usually use hard disk sentinel (both desktop and dos versions) and hd tune to test hard drives. It gives us higher rate chance of finding faulty drives. Usually for every 100 hard drives to test, 2-3 of only gives wrong diagnose but its very easy to distinguish. Hope this helps. good luck.

[domas]

Re: Quickly/efficiently test laptop harddrives

That is a good question, i have the same issue apart from the fact that i have only few of them.

I use easeus partition manager's surface test. But it takes time and is not a solution for 100 drives. I can't access SMART as i am using a cheapo usb controller (esata cable is on the way)

I have recently got a seagate baracuda 1TB for free. At first it was making lots of ticking noise, and would hardly read files.. I have cleaned the contacts on pcb, now it is much smoother, can copy 8gb file back and fourth, surface test didn't work, got stuck/slow within first few percent even though the computer was running overnight.

chkdsk /B said that there were no problems, and no bad sectors... But there are found.001 folders on the drive.. Doesn't make sense.

Any suggestions?

[artois7]

Re: Quickly/efficiently test laptop harddrives

Might be worth either doing a once over 0 pass on the harddrive (active killdisk will do this) or use some D ban software to completely erase the drive.

I'll give HDtune a download and see!