Programs for testing new-out-of-box HD's?

[00birdy]

I know there's some programs out there that will run heavy writing operations to test a new drive but I don't know what the good ones are.

I just bought a Caviar Black 1TB from best buy so I'd like to do a thorough testing on it as I would be able to exchange it pretty easily if any errors were found. I partitioned win to 70GB of C and left the rest to D. Should I run these programs on both partitions or will it overwrite any windows files if I run it on C? Probably won't but doesn't hurt to ask. Thanks in advance.

 

[cin19]

You can the "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" from WD. http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en

This program can test the HDD, and also can format (WRITE ZEROS) the HDD but if you only run the test then all the files will be fine.