Does *any* hard drive pass the "long test"?

[gerrym]

I'm going though my closet and testing some old hard drives to see what I can still use and what I need to throw away. I have a variety of IDE hard drives from Maxtor, Quantum & Seagate and I'm testing them with the Seagate Sea Tools Boot-CD I just download. Out of 8 hard drives I only see one that has actually tripped SMART, but the remaining 7 all pass the short test and all fail the long test. The logs don't provide much insight as to what's actually failing. Anyone know how legitimate these long tests are?

 

[almartin]

You could run CHKDSK on each drive and see what the results are. I think I would reformat them also. The Seagate test may not be that accurate for non Seagate drives.

 

[gerrym]

I reformatted them all and none have any bytes in bad sectors (reported from chkdsk). If the hard drive is legitimately bad, wouldn't it have tripped SMART? ...they are all SMART enabled.

 

[tecmo34]

Seagate doesn't provide much details on the testing (well from what I found in a quick review) but it states that >90% of the drives that past the short-term test are good but to run the long-term test to find those 10%. With your results, I would suspect the drives might be going bad but I would still expect them to be useable for a period of time.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=wvc&vgnextoid=573797f40cce3210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD