hard drive tester

[discprodonline]

I need some help. I just bought a large lot of hard drives and I want to test them to see if they are working or not, but I use a laptop and cannot hook them up to test them...is there any product I can buy to test them??

 

[root]

you coul get an external USB disk enclosure, this would allow you to test them on your laptop.

However I suggest the for the price (~£100) you'd pay for that you might do better to go to cash converters or ebay and get a work station which will be much better for testing them.

You can't really test a drive inside of windows very well, at least I don't know of any tools that are available for disk thrashing.

However if you search for Hiotachi Drive fitness test you find an image for a boot disk that enables you to thoughally (spelling?) test the drive.

I recomend getting a new workstation because
1, it will be easier to swap the drives about.
2, you can have more than one drive connected and tested at a time
3, you'll be hard pushed to find USB device drivers that work under dos, which is where you'll find the easiest disk testing tools.
(if you are confident you could use the USB disk enclosure option and look for some tools in linux.)

 

[discprodonline]

I am not looking for something to test them with on my laptop, I am looking to see if there was any hardware or equipment out there that would enable me to test the drives. I saw a Hard Drive Quick Tester made by Western Digital, but I need to be sure that the equipment will work on all hard drives.

Thank you for the help.

 

[root]

I'm sure dedicated hardware will probably cost more than an old PC anyway.

I guess this kind of hardware does exist because the data recovery people (companies that specialise in data recovery) must use this kind of technology.

 

[bluto]

I need some help. I just bought a large lot of hard drives and I want to test them to see if they are working or not, but I use a laptop and cannot hook them up to test them...is there any product I can buy to test them??

Yes a cheap Pentium 1 Desktop PC and a removeable HD case.