Hard Drive Issue

dawnofthedead · 22 May 2015 at 02:15

I've just bought a WD My Passport Ultra 2TB and used it for the first time yesterday.

I used it for backing up just over 1TB of movies, pics, music and documents.

Before copying my folders and files to the drive, I only used a quick format instead of a full format. Is that ok? Or should I have used a full format because it's a brand new drive?

I'm worried that since I didn't run a full format, I haven't mapped out the bad sectors before backing up to the drive, (and my files could be corrupt or become corrupted) or am I worrying over nothing?

I have WD Data Life Diagnostics and HD Tune, should I run the extended tests to check for bad sectors and the overall health of the drive or would that be pointless?

Some feedback would be much appreciated.

ED209 · 22 May 2015 at 08:06

Quick format should be fine, what file system is it in? as i always make sure its in NTFS as FAT32 as a 4GB file limit (don't know if anyone still sends HDDS out in this! lol)

if its a brand new drive you shouldn't have any bad sectors on it, if you do return it.

you can check the health of the drive but it should be fine as its new

Grrrrr · 22 May 2015 at 08:42

Quick format is fine and I personally wouldn't bother running HDTune but it's good you're thinking about the integrity of your backup! I'd consider adding a third backup for your pictures and documents though, something offsite like cloud storage (Google Drive, dropbox, onedrive etc) or a dedicated backup service (like crashplan or backblaze).

Can never have too many backups

KIA · 22 May 2015 at 18:01

You should always full format brand new drives.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Badblocks#read-write_Test

1) Take a snapshot of the SMART data
2) Full format using badblocks or Windows disk management if you're impatient.
3) Look at SMART data and compare it with the first snapshot.

ginjaninja · 22 May 2015 at 18:21

KIA said:
You should always full format brand new drives.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Badblocks#read-write_Test

1) Take a snapshot of the SMART data
2) Full format using badblocks or Windows disk management if you're impatient.
3) Look at SMART data and compare it with the first snapshot.

sound advice...ive have never long formatted at drive and it hasnt come back to bite me though..

dawnofthedead · 13 Jun 2015 at 02:31

Thanks for the replies. I ran HDtune full scan and all blocks were green thankfully.

What's the difference in the scans between HDTUNE and WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics?

Also, for future reference when I purchase a new HDD, is it better to run a full format then a HDTUNE/WD Lifeguard Diagnostics or the other way around?

Thanks.