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When looking for large new drives (>= 1 TB) on newegg and the like, I note a number of reviews talking about drives being either D.O.A. or hitting the Click of Death (or even releasing the Magic Smoke) within a week or so of use. A portion of the reviews mention this phenomenon whether the drive in question is Western Digital, Hitachi or whatever.

For those of you using Windows, what do you to:

1) Place a large initial stress on the drive to see if it can take it? For how long?

2) Test the drive afterwards (presumably with some sort of S.M.A.R.T. tool or others) to see if any negative changes have been noted?

Note: This is one component of a larger plan for both high-availability and backups for my home data.

Carl B
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3 Answers3

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Current Mean Time Between Failures(MTBF) for consumer SATA drives is 10^14 write bits. This means that if you have a 2TB drive and write every bit 50 times on the drive, and then try to read every bit, you will have a disk failure in that time.
Google has done a lot of statistical analysis of consumer disks and have noted several trends, the most important to your question is that you will get about a 10% chance of failure in the first 3 months if you put your disk in high-utilization (stress test). If it makes it past the first 3-6 months, then it will last 3-4 years before the failure rates starts going back up again.
It's interesting reading if you like statistics, and even those of us who don't, still get the idea from the graphs...
Google link
Another source is Carnegie Mellon

EDIT: One other thing that relates to your question from the Google paper, is that these rates apply across all drive manufacturers. Google buys whatever gives them the most MB for the buck.

adam
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Scott Lundberg
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I don't stress test them at all but I do keep an eye on SMART values. I use Speedfan or HDtune to view the smart data.

pplrppl
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Spinrite does this, both to recover lost data and also as preventative. Using mode 4, it flips each bit 4 times (on/off/on/off or vice versa) looking for bad sectors. If it finds them, it attempts to correct them and mark that sector as bad, or it moves on. Great maintenance for drives and forcing SMART data

david
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