Using BING to Break-In a Hard Drive

I purchased two New 3.5" 2.0 TB SATA300 Hard Drives recently. The plan is to use one for external USB 2.0 Image and file backup and one for the main hard drive containing the System Partition in another PC.

I decided to boot with BING (BootIt Next Generation) and wipe (zero write to all sectors) each hard drive before use. The purpose: Make sure that there is absolutely no chance of anything undesireable being contained on the hard drives and to fully "exercise" each hard drive to try to flush out any defects before the end of the RMA period.

The approximate time for each hard drive wipe is somewhere around 20 hours.

Do you think that what I did is a "waste of time" or is it a good idea?

Thanks in Advance.

 

Waste of time.

 

I'd rather use the free version of HDTune and perform a surface check, to be sure there is no active defect that would cause problems with your backups.

 

At the end of the wipe operation BING automatically does a check for defects.

 

Sure, it's just what I would personally do, I mean use HDTune, or any equivalent (Drevitalize, HDD Regen, HDDScan), especially if its important data that's going to be backup on it.

 

Have you already done this or are you planning to do it?

If you have not done it yet, I would say leave it. There is no logic in wiping each sector of a brand new hard disk, as there is nothing on it to begin with. A surface scan might be considered as okay but I would not even do that. Just partition the drives according to your need and then run a surface scan on each partition one by one in your spare time. This would save you a lot of time.

 

I have already done it. The 2nd drive wipe should finish within the next 4 hours. I have already formatted the 1st drive (Full format to ntfs, ~4.5 hours to complete the format process).

The main reason that I wanted to do the wipe is give each hard drive a "workout" by writing to all sectors. If a hard drive has a defect, the wiping operation "may" bring out the defect before the RMA period expires.

 

Of course it is entirely up to you. If you felt, for your own peace of mind, that you wanted to be sure that each and every sector of the hard drive was in working order, then it is okay to spend such a large amount of time running the wipe and surface check etc. But was it really necessary to do this before putting the drive in operation? which was the question you asked in your first post, I would have to say no. You could have easily installed windows, after running a full format on the OS partition, and then run a disk surface check on the other partitions from within windows. This way you would not have had to spend such a long time offline.

By the way, did you know the full format includes the quick format + disk surface scan using chkdsk? Since you already performed a surface check on the disk during the wipe operation, you wasted time doing the full format and a second surface scan on the same disk. Make sure you don't repeat the same for the second drive

 

i would have just used western digital official tools to check the drives for errors, bad sectors etc and that's all.

 

If you want to give the drives a work out, use DBAN with 37 passes.

What rpm are the drives?

How long does it take to wipe just one HD? 20 hours?