Help with buying new hard drive

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Stormin' Norman:
Have you checked your administrative error logs to see if you are generating a
lot of DISK or other errors?

+1.

Couple times I have had a drive that was throwing errors slow the entire
system down - and there was no way to know about that unless one checked
error logs and/or something like Hard Disk Sentinel.

Sure. Just use the free version of HDTune and
do a read benchmark curve. It'll give you some
idea how really healthy the disk is. If there is a
bad patch in the disk, it will likely show a
characteristic result (a flat spot).

HDTune can sometimes catch an issue, before the
Reallocated Sector count field in SMART does.

Paul