Refurbished hard drives

Hi guys. I received a replacement drive from Maxtor today for my broken
80GB drive. It quite clearly states that the drive is a refurbished
one.

Does anyone have any experience with repaired Maxtor hard drives?
Should I do a drive stress test on it (do they even exist)?

Thanks.

On 28 Oct 2005 07:20:23 -0700, "Random Person"
<nonexistent2032@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>Hi guys. I received a replacement drive from Maxtor today for my broken
>80GB drive. It quite clearly states that the drive is a refurbished
>one.
>
>Does anyone have any experience with repaired Maxtor hard drives?
>Should I do a drive stress test on it (do they even exist)?
>
>Thanks.

You should at least run the Maxtor diagnostics and a maxtor
or 3rd party write, read verify test.

You might also do a surface scan and put the drive into a
non-essential use for awhile, BUT if you make regular
backups of that drive as prudent, that is not so important.

Thanks for your advice, Kony :-)

BTW, can you recommend a good free 3rd party HD read/write/verify tool?
The ones I've seen come from the HD manufacturers themselves.

I've read that refurbished HDs are OK but recertified ones may not be
because they're simply used drives that have been tested. OTOH
refurbed HDs are supposedly mechanically brand new.

On 28 Oct 2005 15:06:52 -0700, "Random Person"
<nonexistent2032@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>BTW, can you recommend a good free 3rd party HD read/write/verify tool?
>The ones I've seen come from the HD manufacturers themselves.


Well if you already have what came with the drive, go ahead
and use it. Seems like Norton Systemworks or McAfee
something-or-other also had a tool. Try the drive
manufacturer's utility first, it might call this option a
low level format, as sometimes that option does this (but
others it may just write zeros to the drive). The
manufacturer's utility is also the better option because it
can be ran right after using the other diagnostics on same
utility CD or floppy.