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.

 

[Merlin]

These drives have a high tendency to freeze and time out for minutes at a time, which seems to make the RAID controller think they've failed. The controller then begins to re-optimize the data which slows down the RAID performance and puts your data at additional risk if another disk should decide to freeze up at an inopportune moment. Not a good feeling for someone who has a lot of essential data sitting on that RAID and needs it to be available. I'm a long time Seagate customer, and my other RAIDs are all populated with high-capacity seagate drives, and I've never had an issue to date. I'm hoping they'll sort this out with a firmware update soon.

 

[mwvirk]

@Merlin
seagate has already released the patch for this issue - that what i read on seagate site and other forums.

 

[Kougar]

If you do not plan to use RAID then this is not an issue you have to be worried about.

There isn't any guarantee that the drive isn't damaged or something unless you know this person. However Seagate drives have a 3 (sometimes 5) year warranty, so if the drive did turn out to be bad you should still be able to warranty it