[HELP]Pre-testing used WD Red drives

[Petep74093]

I am going to be upgrading 4x1TB WD Red HDDs to 4x3TB HDDs in the next few weeks. I have sourced my replacement drives and all are pre-used so I want to see about testing them prior to using them for the upgrade.
I don't have a spare NAS enclosure that I can use to insert them in within a test Raid set up, all I do have is docking station that I use for the backup drive when the weekly backup is run.
So is there any suggested programs or tests that I can run using that setup to gain some confidence in the status of the drives?

Thanks in advance

[dolbyman]

use that usb dock and the manufacturer tools ...with a long test for each drive

[Petep74093]

when you say manufacturer tools I assume you mean WD tools ?

[dolbyman]

yes

[OneCD]

I have sourced my replacement drives and all are pre-used so I want to see about testing them prior to using them for the upgrade.

Also, suggest checking SMART info for 'power-on hours' on each drive. Couldn't hurt to see how many miles they've clocked-up.

[Petep74093]

Thanks dolbyman and OneCD for that info, I'm intending making a start on the testing this weekend. So will take your suggestions on board and will also modify my current scheduled testing as well., so that it is a bit more intensive than I currently do

[Briain]

Apologies, this will sound rather too close to an advert, but it isn't such spam; it is a note about a commercial product that I have nothing to do with (I have no connection to the company) but that I do think very highly of, so it is a genuine recommendation for something worth looking at.

Spinrite is an excellent tool for testing (and recovering) disks, but it isn't a free product (though it isn't too expensive, given how handy it is). The only downside is that the current version will take a long time to do such a large disk, but the Spinrite author (Steve Gibson at grc.com) is about to start working on a far faster version (hope he gets a move on with that project as I believe that it will shave then time down to something more like a couple of hours for a 1 TB disk).

It is in the form of a bootable utility (using FreeDOS, I believe) so it doesn't matter which OS is on the device with the disk under test (nor how the disk is formatted). I have an old PC with no disks in it, but with long IDE and a long SATA cables fitted, so I can site it next to the device without any options to boot from USB or CDROM needing tested, then stretch the appropriate cable over to the disk in the box needing tested (recently used that to do a Sky+ box, for example).

Once it boots up the machine, there are several modes under which it can be run, with 'level 2' being a mode which reads the entire disk, looking for (and when found, trying to recover) bad sectors (so that mode also makes best sense when checking SSDs), and another being the 'level 4' job, which flips all the bits then flips them back again (so a complete read and write of the entire disk) but I have not yet elected to use it in that mode; level 2 has always been enough to suit my requirements. Using 'level 2' mode (and my above mentioned PC) I have recovered quite a few antique enterprise grade disks (from three Linn Kivor music servers - each containing 9 disks - that had been running continuously since 2004) and I've also used it to revive a non-booting laptop. Every few months, I use a 'level 2' scan to check my own PCs' disks (one PC with SSD and one with 2 x 500 GB enterprise HDDs) and also to check my 256 GB laptop SSD (which only takes a few minutes) just to check that things are all looking happy. Obviously, when testing something like my laptop, I just boot it from a CDR with Spinrite and then it can directly check the SSD inside the laptop (no need for my Frankenbox with long cables).

I cannot recall what the other modes are for as I have never used them (I've only used level 2); I must have a look next the time I'm using it.

All the best
Briain

[Petep74093]

As a follow up, in case anyone looks for info later for this, is the following which I hope is useful.
I downloaded the WD Data LifeGuard diagnostics utility from the WD site and used that - there is also the WD Drive Utilities as well but I couldn't get that to 'see' the drive. I think my issue may have been because the drive was plugged into a docking station but not having a direct cable I couldn't confirm that. However it did work ok using the Lifeguard utility through the docking station.
Short test took about 5 minutes per drive and extended tests took between 6 to 6 1/2 hrs per drive ( drives being 3TB ). Smart data also confirmed no apparent issues and low power up times for the drives as well.