New HDD

Having contemplated what to buy for far too long I bought a WESTERN DIGITAL WDBSLA0020HNC 2TB drive the other day, it seems to be one of the few that has a 5-year warranty. I then mounted it in a USB enclosure. Having connected it and created a new simple volume on it I had the choice of a quick format or not. Being a new drive and, perhaps unnecessarily cautious, I chose not to do a quick format. I estimate it'll finish this tea time, after 25-26 hours .

One thought crossed my mind (though it didn't have far to go), is there any quick and simple way of getting the drive parameters including any bad sector information? As I recall this is the sort of info that CHKDSK gives after it's done it's stuff, but it occurs to me it should be possible for some utility to just read off this info without actually doing a check.

Any thoughts?

What you are after is a utility that can read SMART attributes. There's many out there. Running a full format or chkdsk /r is pretty much useless on modern drives and most likely wouldn't report any bad sectors even if there was indeed some - the drive would remap it on the fly with its integrated logic.

Edited by Pipexer (Tue 03-Dec-13 14:26:05)

I notice that defraggler can detail the health of a drive. But only for internal drives, it doesn't give the option for external USB drives.

Does this mean that SMART details are not accessible via a USB interface?

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Does this mean that SMART details are not accessible via a USB interface?

I run Hard Disk Sentinel (I got it from the Bits du Jour website) and it provides s.m.a.r.t. information for hard drives that I connect occasionally using USB enclosures. The information that is available varies from drive to drive so it seems to be dependent on the drive/enclosure firmware.

I recently had my computer company tech chap looking through my computer via remote (I'd had some unexplained freeze-ups and a crash), and at one point, I saw him use the Hard Disk Sentinel.

Not sure it would be of advantage for me personally to install it though because I don't know enough about what to do if a problem is found.

It showed the status/condition of each disk, and on the two larger disks it also showed temp. It didn't show temp on the SSD.
All three had 100% pass with this result: The hard disk status is perfect. Problematic or weak sectors were not found and there are no spin up or data transfer errors.

It appears to check internal and external disks as I see the hdsentinel.com site describes it as:
No need to use separate tools to verify internal hard disks, external hard disks, SSDs, disks in RAID arrays as these are all included in a single software.

They also seem to have a special offer at the moment for �12.50 to download.

Hardly any modern disk will come up with errors, the drive corrects them silently, when it does eventually start to give proper errors because it is past the stage where it can correct them itself - you soon to know about it

Oh! It was rather reassuring to see those disk check results too!

Still, he found nothing untoward, threw out some 'rubbish' etc., and it's been fine since ..so far!

I've recently got a notebook that I've copied some of my more needed stuff onto to serve as an 'emergency' computer to use for my work if this main one gets a serious problem, and always do a back up of the desktop each week.
The desktop is under 3 years old, so hopefully good for a while yet.

Western Digital Drive Diagnostics reads all SMART data.

Thanks I found that DiskCheckUp gives the info, as does the Health tab on Defraggler - for this drive at least.

I have not done a full format on a drive for years, they don't need it these days.