Best way to test older Time Capsule hard drive?

[bobotech]

I have a customer with an older Time Capsule (500 gig) that has been having issues. Will attempt to perform a backup but after many hours, gives up the ghost with a vague error message (can't remember exactly right now). I have updated the firmware, deleted all the files on it, did a factory reset, etc and it still has problems.

I am thinking the hard drive so I did a 1 pass secure erase of the Time Capsule and it got to about 15 percent complete and then just sat there and never got any further, and this is after waiting for 2 days. I started it on Sat morning and today, Mon morning, its still at the same spot.

We have not gotten any errors specific to the hard drive failing but it still is acting like a dying drive.

How can I perform a thorough disk test that will 100 percent point to the bad hard drive? The Time Capsule is completely empty at this point and he does not need ANY data from it.

 

[skorpien]

If the waranty is already gone on the Time Capsule, you can open it up and seat the hard drive in an enclosure or dock.

When you erased the drive, did you do so from AirPort Utility? Also, is the customer backing up over Wi-Fi or via Ethernet?

 

[bobotech]

The warranty is expired, I checked, its the original 1st gen Time Capsule.

At this stage, everything is done via Ethernet because wireless is so much slower.

And yes, I did use the Airport Utility and the 1 pass option of writing zeros to the drive to erase the drive.

I just want to do a hard core testing of the drive like you can with Disk Utility or some other 3rd party tool. I'm not sure that the failure of the erase confirms that the drive is bad.

 

[skorpien]

If the customer is okay with it, I would open the Time Capsule and connect the drive directly to a computer to run tests. And if it proves to be a bad drive, you could take that opportunity to possibly upgrade the capacity of the Time Capsule. I've installed a 2TB drive inside my original 500GB TC myself and it's not a very difficult procedure at all.