Stress testing hd

stress test might cause premature death.

Yes but I would rather it die now with nothing on it than when I have 2tb of data, and this is just to check for the early fail hd

Just doing a zero fill isn't a good test. You need to write the full surface of the disk with a few different patterns AND also read the data back to check for errors.

Plus you should also check the SMART data & temperatures. For example an increase in the relocated sector counts.

A few hours of testing isn't going to significantly impact on the overall life of the drive. (At least no more than doing regular drive backups would).

Makes total sense to do this before putting important data on the drive. Also makes total sense to keep good backups.

could you explain how to use different patterns and how to read the data back? I only know about the SMART attributes.

I don't understand. The hard drive might survive the stress-test, only to fail 6-12 months from now. Why not just forget the stress test, so that the hard drive might last longer? Meanwhile, you have everything backed up on a second hard drive. That's what I would do anyway.

Drive fail more often when new.
So for a drive in heavy use the failure rate is around 11% in the first 3 months. But only around 1.5% for the rest of the first year.

After recording the behaviour of 100,000 real hard drives in a study Google suggested this,

"One possible explanation for this behavior is the survival of the fittest theory. It is possible that the failure modes that are associated with higher utilization are more prominent early in the drive’s lifetime. If that is the case, the drives that survive the infant mortality phase are the least susceptible to that failure mode, and result in a population that is more robust with respect to variations in utilization levels."

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/un...

Meaning that if your drive doesn't immediately fail (infant mortality) then it is much more likely to have a long and happy life. If it does fail then better it A) fails while under warranty and B) Fails without loosing any important data.

See Google for tools to do this,
https://www.google.com/search?q=disk+burn+in+test