Dropped external hard disk, still good?

[swingerofbirch]

I just bought a seagate 1 tb drive ( http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeA...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1235565852&sr=8-1 ), and as soon as I plugged it into my MacBook to initialize it I made a classy move where I picked up the MacBook and drug the hard disk from a height of 3 feet to a hard floor with a clunk. The light on the disk turned off, when I picked it up I could feel it moving a bit inside, Mac OS X said it had been unplugged improperly, I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and partitioned it, and it passed the disk utility "verify disk"...question is...how reliable do you think the disk is now for archival purposes?

 

[velocityg4]

I just bought a seagate 1 tb drive ( http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeA...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1235565852&sr=8-1 ), and as soon as I plugged it into my MacBook to initialize it I made a classy move where I picked up the MacBook and drug the hard disk from a height of 3 feet to a hard floor with a clunk. The light on the disk turned off, when I picked it up I could feel it moving a bit inside, Mac OS X said it had been unplugged improperly, I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and partitioned it, and it passed the disk utility "verify disk"...question is...how reliable do you think the disk is now for archival purposes?

Though hard drives can withstand bigger shocks then in the past it is difficult to say how reliable it will be. I would format the drive again but have Disk Utility perform a secure erase overnight. Do at least the Zero Out Data option preferably the 7 pass erase.

This will stress test the drive and force writing to the entire disk surface. If it can complete this test successfully then I would say the drive is good to go.

 

[displaced]

Though hard drives can withstand bigger shocks then in the past it is difficult to say how reliable it will be. I would format the drive again but have Disk Utility perform a secure erase overnight. Do at least the Zero Out Data option preferably the 7 pass erase.

This will stress test the drive and force writing to the entire disk surface. If it can complete this test successfully then I would say the drive is good to go.

Also, checking the drive's internal status monitoring (called SMART) might help. Unfortunately, OS X does not support querying SMART information on drives connected via USB or Firewire. So, either fit the drive internally on another Mac, or plug it in to a PC to check the SMART status.

 

[carfac]

Not to bring you down.... but the Seagate 1 TB drives are inherently buggy. I went through three a few months ago, finally replaced it with a WD just for the peace of mind. Check Newegg reviews, you will see.

I guess they say they fixed it, but Seagate still leaves a bad taste in my mouth after my personal experience.

 

[swingerofbirch]

Thanks for all the advice, I have an iMac with Windows I can use to check the smart status and will do the overnight 7 pass erase to stress test it.