4 Things You Should Do When You Receive A New Hard Drive

As the prices of PC components continue to spiral out of control, assembling a top-of-the-line gaming rig has become more expensive than ever. Storage devices are no exception, and despite ultra-fast SSDs blossoming in popularity, buying a high-capacity hard drive can still blow a hole in your wallet.

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To make matters worse, HDDs are prone to manufacturing defects and even brand-new drives can suffer from bad sector errors. That’s before you include the terrible practice of sellers sealing old drives in identical packaging to the original and putting them up for sale as new. So, here’s a set of tests that you should perform every time you grab a new HDD to save yourself (and your wallet) a lot of trouble down the line.

4 Inspect the packaging

And check for physical damage

This may sound rather obvious, but the packaging is the first thing you should examine when you buy a new hard drive. Most HDD manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital tend to ship their drives inside a slightly large cardboard box and include some cushioning/padding around the static bag that houses the HDD.

If your HDD is missing two or more of these, you should remain en garde because the seller may have tampered with the contents of the package. Now’s also a good time to inspect the HDD for damage. A torn label or markings on the drive are obvious signs you should be on the lookout for. Apart from that, you should make a note of the serial number, because that’s what we’ll use in the next step…

3 Verify the warranty status of the drive

Registering your HDD has a two-fold benefit

Source: XDA

Most manufacturers grant a warrant period on their drives. So, before you slap the HDD into your PC for thorough testing, it’s a good idea to open the manufacturer’s website and register your hard drive. Besides the added advantage of allowing you to file for a warranty claim in case the HDD unexpectedly bites the dust, this will also help you ascertain whether the drive is actually brand-new or used.

Since the serial number of every drive is unique, you can’t register it multiple times. As such, if your seemingly new HDD has been registered on their website, it’s a pre-owned or a refurbished drive.

2 Evaluate the S.M.A.R.T. statistics

CrystalDiskInfo is an incredible tool for this purpose

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T., is a facility built into modern drives that keeps track of its error rate, health condition, power cycles, and several other metrics. Besides allowing you to maintain a vigilant eye on the condition of your existing drives, the S.M.A.R.T. statistics can help ascertain whether your newly attached HDD is failing.

I tend to use CrystalDiskInfo as it’s a fairly lightweight application that provides most of the important metrics for the drive. In particular, you should check the Total Host Reads, Total Host Writes, Power On Count, and Power On Hours values. In case they number in thousands, the drive has been used before. Likewise, a new hard drive (and even old HDDs, for that matter) should have a full set of zeroes for all attributes with the IDs between C4 and C8, as these parameters reflect critical errors and are a sure-shot sign that the drive is defective.

1 Perform a thorough stress test

Be sure to run another S.M.A.R.T. test after you’re done

Stress testing is a term that you should be familiar with if you’re in the PC landscape. But your high-end processor, blazing-fast RAM, and cutting-edge GPU aren’t the only components you should throw in the stress test wringer. Once you’ve completed the previous steps, I recommend performing a full write test on your HDD to ensure that it’s not plagued by bad sector errors.

Hard Drive Sentinel is my recommended tool for extended tests if you’re on Windows. Although it’s a paid application, HD Sentinel’s robust testing suite makes the standard edition worth the $22 price tag. Alternatively, H2testw is a neat app if you’re looking for a free alternative to HD Sentinel. All that said, there’s no beating badblocks as far as HDD testing is concerned. However, the drawback with the app is that it’s limited to Linux, and you’ll need some familiarity with WSL if you want to run badblocks on a Windows machine.

Regardless of the tool you utilize for the extended read-and-write tests, it’s a good idea to keep the tests under control. That’s because extensive stress on the HDD can damage the drive and reduce its lifespan. Once you’re done verifying that the drive is free of bad sector errors, it’s a good idea to perform one last S.M.A.R.T. test before resuming your normal operations.

Ensuring your drives (and data) remain in tip-top shape

Although hard drives are more cost-effective than high-speed SSDs, they tend to have a shorter lifespan in general due to their moving parts. What’s worse, drives can end up failing out of nowhere even if you take great care of them. This makes backing up your data an important maintenance task if you don’t wish to lose important files to corruption or other drive-related ailments.

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