Good, Reliable Hard Drive Fitness Test

[chazus]

Our shop is clearing out a stock of refurb/used drives, and I'm trying to figure out what the best way to test the drives is. We're going to be reselling them, but I want to ensure that the drives are definitely good.

Right now, I'm running a SMART test, and Victoria test, to see if there's any anomalies. Even with those, I've seen drives that pass both still unable boot/install windows.

Should I just run those, and do a test install of windows to see how it goes? Any better ideas?

[Evildeffy]

The only thing you can do is run a proper sector check.

I use ViVard from Hiren's Boot CD as it shows you proper progress, the only downside is that it's DOS based which is good for live readout (better than Windows) but no multi-tasking.

The thing you watch out for is the counter .. if it stops multiple times through for a while but doesn't register a fault it means there's often an actuator movement issue.

After it's done a full 100% scan (WITHOUT REMAP!) you read out SMART values again as by then it'll have refreshed over the entire drive.

There's nothing more you can do after that, some may fail, others may not... there's no way for you to know if it doesn't come out of the test.

Installing Windows afterwards is fine as well but always read out the SMART values regardless.
I use either CrystalDiskInfo or HDD Guardian for that, the latter a bit more detailed.

Of most of the HDD scans there are... ViVard for me has proven to be the most reliable even above the vendor made ones because ViVard tells you the issue rather than the vendor ones with "Found an error and fixed it!" etc.