Checking harddives for bad sectors

[t121anf]

I have a stack of 2TB hard drives which I've replaced with 4TB ones over the years.

Some of the 2TB ones were replaced as they started to develop bad sectors.

I would like to use the good drives and blank & bin the ones with bad sectors.

Any tips on how to id which is which?

Would connecting to them via a USB caddy and checking the capacity in Windows be enough? (based one identical model numbers)

[WD Forte]

Mmmm.
There's probably a shit load of utils you can use to check HDDs and get all manner of detail info
But as I have Speccy which is free ware, I'd start by looking at the SMART data for power on hours and logged faults.
If they have years of uptime and lots fo uncorrectable faults, I'd bin them

(or format them, wipe a damp rag over them and sell them on Ebay as 'refurbished ' )

Speccy
https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy/download
If you get it
Dont let it install Chrome during setup unless you want it to!
untick the box to avoid this
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[blurredman]

Agree with Forte.

I myself use a caddy (specifically with IDE interface as well as SATA) for quick checks.

I use Crystal Disc myself though.

It's quick and easy and you don't even have to install it. It just displays the SMART data.


Have chucked out 15 hard discs recently.
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[xX-Alex-Xx]

Chkdsk is all you need ...

https://www.techjunkie.com/fix-hard-drives-chkdsk-windows-10/
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DILLIGAF

[MarJay]

Bad sectors aren't always a disaster. There are other SMART errors that will put a drive beyond use. Often the bad sectors are just scanned and found by the OS and then marked bad, and the data is put elsewhere on the disc. Normally the number of bad sectors is not a large quantity, at least not large enough to put more than a few Mb beyond use.

I used to work for a company that built their own storage arrays, and there were some SMART errors that just meant a drive was going to die in short order. This is what I'd be worried about personally. Or if using a RAID and one drive seems to have a lower performance than it's brother, or it's peers, then I'd consider ditching that too.
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[t121anf]

I don’t recall smart errors, just bad sectors. I replaced them either way as a matter of maintenance, before replacing again with 4TB.

I’ll stick them in a caddy and see if I can get these bits of software to tell me anything.

From memory once I used the manufacturer software to mark the bad sectors as bad, when scanned again they where “good”.

Something to do since working from home work has slowed a little.

[Easy-X]

I used to use the Western Digital hard drive utility. Mostly works with non -HD kit. Search for Data Lifeguard.

It does a quick SMART check and really, if that fails you don't bother checking any further (usually it's the "relocated sectors" threshold that goes red with the classic bad blocks scenario.) After that the quick (non destructive) test exposes any drives that are on their way out.

The main thing is it sorts the absolute crap out in moments rather than some exhaustive test (which you can still do later of course) that takes 6 hours to come up with the same answer.
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