drive burn in

[beerman]

I just received my first 1tb drive which I plan to store tv shows and movies on. I would like to "burn in" or test the drive thoroughly before transferring all my shows to it. What is the best method?

Thanks

[ztirffritz]

As a personal rule, I always purchase drives in pairs. One for the data, one for the backup. Just something to think about.

I'd imagine that the Disk Utility tool that writes ones/zeros over the entire drive for several hours/days would probably do what you're looking for.

[mattkime]

Disk utility zero all sectors does a thorough job testing the drive. there might be more thorough methods but they'll get arcane.

unfortunately i don't think a test like this does much to protect you from a failed drive.

[Doc]

Zeroing the drive may map out bad sectors, but is not a "burn in."

Your best option is to buy a second drive (and maybe a third...and burn some optical discs) as a backup if you're committing important files to it.

[beerman]

Thanks for the info on disk utility, I'll give that a shot.

[Harbourmaster]

Intech HDST has a great "Integrity" test!

Intech wrote:

Integrity for MacOS X

For use with
MacOS X v10.2 - v10.5.x "Leopard"

The Integrity utility is an application which began life as an in-house testing program here at Intech. This simple to use utility quickly proved to be one of our most trusted disk drive testing tools. It creates a test file, writes a revolving data pattern to your disk and reads it back in, each time comparing the data pattern to the original. And, it does it all as fast as your disk and its interface can handle - showing no mercy to sporadic problems. You can think of Integrity as a "stress test" for your hard disk drive. Plus, Integrity is extremely safe since all of its tests are performed to a temporary test file, leaving your existing data completely untouched.

http://www.speedtools.com/Integrity.html

I have been using the entire HDST suite since the OS 9 days on all of my drives! http://www.speedtools.com/PrdInfo.html

IIRC Drive Genius also has a Drive Integrity Test as well... http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Prosoft%2...ing/52100/

[motopsyco]

I use Integrity in the Intech Speed Tools Test Suite to burn in hard drives.

http://www.speedtools.com/TestSuite.html

Affordable!

Cheers!

[RAMd®d]

I know what it is to "burn-in" a monitor (bad thing) and speakers/headphones (good thing).

But burning in an HD? What would such a thing accomplish?

Zeroing an HD is not burning it in, though it should map out bad sectors (assuming there aren't a ton of them) and that a good thing too.

[ztirffritz]

I think that he just wants to stress-test the drive before committing 1TB of video files to the drive. Sudden drive failure is too common for me to trust everything to one drive.

[beerman]

I snapped up the integrity utility, I'll do both tests, really give the drive a workout! Thanks.