How To Check Brand New Hard Disk

[mwvirk]

Hello friends,

I got some doubt and need your help to find out some solution:

I want to buy an additional HD for my desktop C2Q.

My friend is giving me 1500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 32MB cache HD on just half of the actual (market) price.

He said he brought it and somehow his PC was not supporting this HD and he need money and wants to sale it.

I’m little bit confused and not sure. Sometime thinking that there might be some problem and he just wants to get rid of this.

I want to know how I can check if this HD is new and was not used at all.

Or if he used it then how I can check that HD is 100% ok and reliable and it will not give me any problem.

At last I will say that my friend is giving me as a brand new HD but for some reason I cannot take any risk and want to be sure before I take it and use it.

NOW:

>>> i only want to know if this hard disk is 100% free of all fault/errors.

>>> i was reading in another forum that seagate 1.5tb & 2tb drive are having some problems and its freezing - seagate later release some firmware updates to fix this problem.

Need your help. Thanks.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Unless you mate brought the wrong type ie. sata/ide then all he needs to do is go to disk management and initiate the drive and then format it..... Simples

 

[JN]

If he's got an old machine it is quite possible that his motherboard won't support it due to its size.

I'd run a scandisk on the drive followed by something like hdtach/hdtune to make sure you can read/write the entire way along the disk.

Seagate might have some tools on their website too.

 

[Rastalovich]

A year, sometimes month too, birthday may be on the label somewhere.

In terms of how much use, a SMART reader can give u a fair idea, u can run them from DOS. google is ur friend.

I'd mention what Jim's saying too, if ur m8 has a SATA-1 platform, first of all the drive will need a jumper - some don't offer this - AND if he was trying to install windows on it, it won't see anything partitioned above 137g. This is all if the build is an old one.

Strangely enough, u can partition it to 137g, install windows, then use the rest.