Concerned about replacement hard drive.

[DavidTJ]

I need to replace my dads broken hard drive. I was going to put in one of my backup drives (have used for storing Movies mainly). An Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 however I was a bit concerned about the hdtune benchmark that I ran after I formatted the drive.

The raw numbers seem ok its the erratic nature I was concerned about. As I know nothing about hard drives I thought I would ask yourselves if this is just a normal bit of ageing or if I am replacing a bad drive with a potentially bad drive?

Here for instance is a benchmark I saw for a similar drive

As per SkyNetRising's request, a screenshot of the health section (I also ran a full error scan which was all clear)

 

[SkyNetRising]

Post screenshot of health section.

 

[DavidTJ]

Post screenshot of health section.

Updated the main post following your good advice

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there DavidTJ,

The graph shouldn't really look that way. Though, it seems that the drive has no bad sectors on it.
One thing you can try is to attach the drive with different SATA+power cables to another port and re test. If the issue persists, you can use some third party tool that can write zeros on the drive -> re test. Keep in mind that this is a data destructive process.
It will not hurt to update MOBO drivers as well.

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[DavidTJ]

Hi there DavidTJ,

The graph shouldn't really look that way. Though, it seems that the drive has no bad sectors on it.
One thing you can try is to attach the drive with different SATA+power cables to another port and re test. If the issue persists, you can use some third party tool that can write zeros on the drive -> re test. Keep in mind that this is a data destructive process.
It will not hurt to update MOBO drivers as well.

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

Thanks I will finish off error scanning the dud drive I pulled out from my dads pc, then start down the rabbit hole.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Drive health looks OK.
Could it be that some process other than benchmark itself is continuously reading/writing to drive during benchmark
(utorrent downloading something)?
That benchmark picture would be ok also for drive where windows is installed.

 

[DavidTJ]

Drive health looks OK.
Could it be that some process other than benchmark itself is continuously reading/writing to drive during benchmark
(utorrent downloading something)?
That benchmark picture would be ok also for drive where windows is installed.

Thats why I found it so odd, It is a drive I copied stuff off of, then I did a windows format it was completely empty. I think perhaps me doing lots of file transferring on other drives may have affect the benchmark, but I am not sure if this is possible or why it would happen.

I have now switched the cables and zero filled the drive. Below is the new graph, not perfect but seems a lot better than it was (I ran one before I did anything other than the cable swap and it looked like the one below.so I am not sure zero filling did much but there was no harm)

 

[D_Know_WD]

It looks fine now. Keep in mind that you need to keep the data you can't afford to loose stored on at least two places.
The zero filling process can't really harm the drive, unless the drive is already failing. It fills in 0 value in each sector and completely wipes the data.
After just a simple reformat, the data is still there. This is why, you can recover data out of a reformatted drive.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD