Here is my situation:

I have an old Western Digital 80GB drive (WD800JB) that I removed from one of my machines when it seemed to be acting up. IO activity when accessing the drive would sometimes halt for half a minute. I copied my important data to a new drive ASAP and removed the WD drive.

I was recently setting up an old machine and looking through my hardware for a harddrive I can put in it and found the WD 80GB.

My problem is that I dont know if I can trust the drive. I am looking for a good way to test it.

So far I have used the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic disk from their website to run a full test and then to zero the drive and both worked fine without error.

I have not yet tested to see what SMART says about the drive as the old machine I have it in now doesnt support SMART in the BIOS.

Is there a better way to test for drive stability? I understand that drives fail all the time so I cant be "guaranteed" that it will be fine and all that, I just want some reassurance that it is currently OK before I start setting up a system on it.

Thanks in advance.

Well, I would try (under whatever Linux you'd like on this box: Knoppix if you aren't running Linux there) running the 'badblocks' check. I would also try 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/DRIVE' and so forth. Just put it through its paces

Thanks for the suggestions.

The Western Digital utility did a badblock scan and i used it to zero the drive. Both worked fine.

Then I'd say there is no evidence that your hard drive is likely to fail soon... unless of course, you hear weird noises or something like that.

Mine have always made clicking noises and giving i/o error messages when they failed, except for the one I dropped on the floor.

Well I will start building a system on it and see how it goes. Nothing important goes on it for now.

I also have an older 40GB Maxtor that started making noises. Maybe I should drag that out and see how it is too....