Do you test your new hard drives?

[DoYouKubuntu]

I'm on the "I'm too lazy to test" side. Oh, sure, I used to do it--back a million years ago, and [as I recall now] only when it involved the system at work. My routine is pretty much: buy new drive, make sure old drive is thoroughly backed up, preferably in more than one place, with at least one place being off-site, then get to work copying its files over to the new drive, and that's that. Of course, new drive immediately begins being backed up--so if it crashes, there's really no harm done. And that's really the gist of how I do computer stuff--ALWAYS make sure I have good backups, so in the case of a hard drive failure which, of course, has happened over the years (rarely, thank goodness!), there's no panic, no "OMFG!" moment, just the effort involved with copying files over to a[nother] new drive.

[SteveRiley]

Oh, sure, I used to do it--back a million years ago

How many bytes of storage was on that drive hooked up to your abacus?

[oshunluvr]

Sorry, abacus is only about 5000 years old. Maybe piles of rocks?

[GerardV]

I remember my first "IBM Compatible", after the Amiga, a 386 DX cobbled together out of odds and ends in about 1992.
The outstanding feature was a massive, and i mean massive 500 Mb Seagate SCSI HDD, coupled to a Adaptec SCSI card.
That drive and card came out of an old file server. The card itself was very big with the old ISA bus, always had trouble shoehorning it into subsequent boxes.
Became to be a bit of a party trick, towards the end i had taken the cover off and showed everyone the inner workings of a HDD in action, until it died mercifully.

[InsideJob]

I was late to the IBM PC game. I was sure the Z-80 was going to make a come back, with the help of the DEC Rainbow. Finally bought a Gateway 2000 386-25Mhz just so I could run Windows/386 2.11 and Excel 1.0. I remember having to MANUALLY enter the defect list (bad sectors) on a new drive before i could use it. Seemed like if I even looked at if funny it would develop more bad sectors. Norton Disk Doctor was my best friend.

I've had one drive go bad in the last couple years and I'm pretty sure it was because of a bad power supply.

[Rod J]

Seemed like if I even looked at if funny it would develop more bad sectors. Norton Disk Doctor was my best friend.

Yes, the hardware back then was SO temperamental! I remember the ram chips in my first PC (Dick Smith System 80 - (TRS80 clone)) always seem to be working themselves out of their sockets and I would have to power down and fiddle about with them to get it working again ... and the 5 1/4" floppy drives were incredibly unreliable, always seemed to be going 'out of tune'.

Later, when I upgraded to my first PC (Commodore XT clone) I do have very fond memories of Norton Utilities, they were a great set of tools back then.

[oshunluvr]

always seem to be working themselves out of their sockets and I would have to power down and fiddle about with them to get it working again

I was running a small PC repair business in the 80's. You can't imagine how many machines I "fixed" doing exactly that.

[DoYouKubuntu]

How many bytes of storage was on that drive hooked up to your abacus?

Sorry, abacus is only about 5000 years old. Maybe piles of rocks?

Yes--pebbles, actually.