How to stress test hard drives?

I have two new hard drives that I want to test.

One is an external seagate 5tb drive. I downloaded the seagate tool and ran the short tests - now I'm running the long test which is just a read test I believe.

The second one is an internal 1tb seagate firecuda drive. I'd like to test it now before I take it to to some relatives to replace their HDD.

How do I stress test these drives?

 

Usually SMART Long Test will suffice because most stress test are synthetic. I've had 2 drives that passed all stress tests but failed afterwards during file copy. SMART still shows OK but they are pretty much dead.

 

Thanks.

Is there any way to run basic tests on an internal drive without actually installing it inside a laptop?

 

You can use Ubuntu or any Linux distro LiveCD to do SMART Short/long test to verify disk health.

 

I meant without having to put the HDD inside a laptop.

 

SATA to USB adapter.

 

I tested a new 2.5 drive I got. using https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PTUQE4M

I used the seagate tools program from Windows.
SMART passed, but the long test was failing at 0% completed and the message seemed to indicate it was a bad sector error, and not much help beyond that.

I then tried gsmartcontrol in linux.
Did Short offline, Conveyance offline, and Extended offline and all passed.
So is the drive ok, and something wrong with the seagate tools program?

I have attached the results of the test in linux.

 

Booting into USB flash or portable OS will put any modern HDD into Frozen mode which can be Un-frozen by putting the pc to sleep and then resuming from sleep.

 

I did not boot into USB/portable OS...

 

Maybe an issue with Seagate seatools. I use Linux GSMART Control to do SMART tests.