How to Test New My Passport?

Portable Drives My Passport
1

Hi everyone!
I am on Win7Pro. I just purchased a WD 4TB My Passport. Reading the reviews on Amazon, I noticed someone advise to run a stress test on any new drive (to check the reliability of the hard drive) before putting data on it for storage. He recommended doing a 24 hour test with a particular program. I do not have any intention of spending $50 (what the program he recommended cost) on a program that I would only use every couple of years (if it is even applicable with the hard drives of 3 years from now!).

Therefore, is WD’s included HDD Drive Utilities (which includes a SMART test, as well as Quick and Complete Drive tests–pic of page listing drive checks) enough? I’m not talking testing to benchmark the speed, but instead testing the sectors etc to make sure the drive wont catastrophically fail (or have any other type of failure) on me.

How many passes of the full test should I run before declaring it to be good? Is it really necessary to test it for a whole 24 hours (as the reviewer said), or just one or two complete passes?
How frequently should I test my external backup drives?

What free programs (other than ChkDsk) should I be using (if any) to get a second opinion on my external drives (if necessary/recommended)? (Most of them are Seagate, a handful are WD.)

Someone else mentioned Formatting the Drive before putting data on it. Is this necessary?
If Disk Management fixes sectors, would restoring an image (Macrium Reflect etc) from prior to the format make those now-fixed sectors broken again?

If a drive is formatted, will the preloaded software (in this case WD’s stuff, that I would back up elsewhere prior to the format) still work on the drive?

Would a default format Allocate space that the manufacturer purposely left Unallocated (as spare sectors for maintenance purposes–usually roughly 5% iirc), thus harming the drive long term?

Is it necessary to run WD’s Data Lifeguard Diagnostics before first use to establish a benchmark or check for errors?

My goal (as stated previously) is to make sure the drive and the sectors on it are good before I dump large amounts of data onto it for (probably long term) storage.

Thank you all very much in advance. :slight_smile:

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Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, even if that advice doesn’t speak to all of my (admittedly many) questions. Thank you! :slight_smile:

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Hello,

I recommend running a test using WD DLG

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows

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@Hamlet Thanks for the response and the advice!
Can anyone speak as to whether or not reformatting gets rid of (as in, allocates) the spare sectors (what I refer to as factory-set unallocated space)? I heard someone say that spare sectors/reserve space was at the firmware level, and thus Windows wouldnt be able to put into a partition the sectors the factory et aside for “over-provisioning”. Is there any truth to this? thanks.