The UI in HDAT2 is a little rough to navigate, we generally used the default choices for the most part and tried not to wander too far from there. You have to reboot your system into both of these so it's offline while you're performing these operations but they've both recovered drives that had failed or were starting to exhibit failures. Here are a couple of screenshots of HDAT2:

The latter is a commercial tool but the former, HDAT2, is an opensource project. We've had good success using the following 2 tools where I work. Offline-uncorrectable 100|100| 0 n/a 0 sectors Old-age Offline

Reallocated-event-count 89| 89| 30 good 14877766723263 Pre-fail OnlineĬurrent-pending-sector 100|100| 0 n/a 0 sectors Old-age Online Hardware-ecc-recovered 45| 38| 0 n/a 5854752 Old-age Online Temperature-celsius-2 42| 58| 0 n/a 42C / 108F Old-age Online Load-cycle-count 1| 1| 0 n/a 248327 Old-age Online Power-off-retract-count 100|100| 0 n/a 15 Old-age Online High-fly-writes 100|100| 0 n/a 0 Old-age OnlineĪirflow-temperature-celsius 58| 42| 45 FAIL_PAST 42C / 108F Old-age Online Reported-uncorrect 100|100| 0 n/a 0 sectors Old-age OnlineĪttribute-188 100| 96| 0 n/a 0 Old-age Online Spin-retry-count 100|100| 97 good 0 Pre-fail Online Power-on-hours 89| 89| 0 n/a 424.4 days Old-age Online Reallocated-sector-count 100|100| 36 good 0 sectors Pre-fail Online Start-stop-count 98| 98| 20 good 2785 Old-age Online Spin-up-time 100| 99| 0 n/a 0 Pre-fail Online Determining a drives healthĪfter you've tortured the drive you can use this command to check out the general health of the drive: % sudo udisks -dump | grep -A 24 UpdatesĪttribute Current|Worst|Threshold Status Value Type Updates I wouldn't call hdparm a torture test but it does give you a rough idea of a drives overall performance. Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 16.70 seconds = 3.83 MB/sec Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.25 seconds =102.40 MB/sec I usually use hdparm, for example: % hdparm -Tt /dev/hdb

There's also bonnie++, as well as hdparm. Might be overkill but there's Phoronix Test Suite.

Linux disk reader for windows