I want to sell a Samsung Spinpoint T166 500GB HDD on eBay. I always test my drives before selling them to make sure they're ok. I've tried the HUTIL from Samsung with UBCD, but it doesn't detect any HDDs. I've used it before on older PCs. This is probably due to the newer chipset. The Seatools from Seagate with Windows do not want to scan a Samsung Drive.
What is the proper way of testing any HDD for bad sectors nowadays? I'm happy to use any Windows / Linux / Mac / UBCD Tool.
The Windows tools I would typically use would be HDDScan and HD Tune. These provide quick and full scan options, as well as SMART outputs you can use to verify.
There are a number of HDD scan tools on The Ultimate Boot CD if you wish to scan without a specific OS.
It's worth noting that, if you intend on selling the drive, you can run destructive write tests that will provide a far more thorough test in terms of both reading and writing to each sector, although this will take a lot longer.
It's also a good idea to run secure HD erasing software across the drive if you haven't already, as I don't know what data you were storing on this device but it could still be recoverable without this. There are a number of software options on the previously linked Ultimate Boot CD, or you can use Active Kill, which is compliant with the United States Department of Defense standards of hard drive data destruction.
All of the Windows utilities should work fine, assuming the drive is acknowledged within Windows. The boot disc options may be a little more hit and miss, but mostly should also work assuming they're not tied to a certain brand of hard drive.
Modern (i.e., less than some 20 to 25 years old) disk drives don't show bad sectors. If they show up, the drive is as good as dead.
Explanation: To create disk drives with no defects, given the high bit density, is impossible at reasonable price points. Disk drives contain a number of spare cylinders/sectors, and the on-disk firmware remaps failing/broken sectors transparently to spares. So you "see" broken sectors only when the drive has run out of spares.
One of the common failure modes of disk drives is that specs of magnetic material float around. They hit the platters spinning at high speed, damaging the surface and dislodging further specs. This is clearly an exponential damage process.
So, if bad sectors do show up, the damage is already extensive and rapidly increasing. Turn it off, get a replacement, and back up using the last few hours (at most) of disk live. Then send it to join the big RAID in the sky, it has deserved it.
Yes, the above is corroborated by (painful) personal experiences. Yes, I've seen a disk with a defective sector which worked fine for at least a year, but for that one dozens of others that failed catastrophically a few hours later.
