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Whenever you get a new hard drive, run a badblock scan, preferably the default 4 pass write/read test. If impatient, run for 2 passes, or control-c when its done checking the 2nd/3rd pass. Then check the S.M.A.R.T. data to see if there are any: Reallocated Sector Count*, Reallocation Count*, Current Pending Sector Count*, Uncorrectable Sector Count*, Write Error Rate, 0 to small amount of read error rate (some fields and values vary across drives and manufactures, but the sector/reallocated fields should always be 0). Once you start getting bad sectors, replace the drive ASAP. To test the drive: Download and boot up a Linux distro. This process will take many hours to days to complete depending on the drive speed, drive size, USB vs SATA, chipset and computer, etc. Open a terminal (or not already at a shell), then type: sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 (or 512 if its an old drive..type 'fdisk -l' to show if its 512 or 4096 sector format) /dev/sdX (X is your particular device) , example: sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 /dev/sda. There is an optional -c which specifics the amount of blocks at a time to process, it may or may not increase the speed. If you use it try -c 131072 or -c 65536, or -c 32768, or -c 16384. Might come in handy if testing multiple drives at once. Try running it for 10-20 seconds with a -c [xxxxxx] or leaving it out, and ctrl-c after 20 seconds--do that for 3-4 different block speeds to determine which one progresses the furthest @ 20 seconds (or whatever interval you count to). For me, leaving the -c option out worked best. What you are doing is exercising the drive and writing all: 00000000s, 11111111s, 10101010s, and 01010101s patterns across the entire space of the drive, and verifying that it correctly wrote every single bit that writes to the platter. Usually (not always) if a drive is bad, it will show up sooner than later, so you are giving the new drive a solid workout to determine if the drive is defective or not. These are mid-level desktop drives with only a 2-year warranty. Mid-Level HDDs used to have a 3 year (sometimes 5) year warranty. Yeah, it's not a bad idea to get into the mindset that when you buy a new HDD, don't expect to be able to use if for a few days until after you test it! It's only your data . . .