“Hello Reddit. I recently purchased a "new" hard drive off eBay. I ran a program and it showed the health as 33%. This is kind of concerning, considering it should be a "new" drive. The hours the disk has been running was 0 and the powered-on count was 1, but I am pretty sure this can be altered. Can someone give me a guide or list of steps to take to confirm if this is a new drive?”reddit.com
Just like the user above was troubled, it may not be that easy to tell whether a newly purchased drive is new. So, in this post, we are going to show you how to tell if a hard drive has been used.
How to Tell if a Hard Drive Is New or Used
Way 1. Check the Hard Drive’s Physical Appearance
To tell if a disk is new, you can start by checking the appearance of the disk. You can carefully inspect the hard drive for signs of wear, such as dents or cracks on the surface of the disk, damage to the connections to external disks, etc.
Additionally, you can connect the disk to your computer and check if the drive is making strange noises.
If there are obvious signs of wear on the surface of the disk, or the hard drive makes a loud noise when spinning, this may be a sign that the disk has been used.
Way 2. Check Hard Drive Health via Tools
In addition to checking the appearance of the disk, you can also test the SMART data of the disk. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, Reporting, and Technology. It is a monitoring system utility that is included on your computer’s HDD or SSD drive and can measure the reliability of your computer’s drive.
Many tools can be used to check the health status of hard drives and provide detailed status-checking reports, such as CrystalDiskInfo, Active@ Hard Disk Monitor, etc. Generally speaking, if the status of the disk is not very good after testing, there is a chance that the disk has been used.
Alternatively, you can check hard drive health via CMD.
In the Windows search box, type cmd and then click Command Prompt from the best match result.
In the command line window, type wmic and press Enter.
Next, type diskdrive get status and press Enter.
If the status says “Bad” or “Unknown”, it’s possible that the drive is experiencing an impending hardware failure. This also means that the disk may be in bad condition and may have been used.
Further Reading
If you have the demand for data recovery from an old hard drive, you can use MiniTool Power Data Recovery. It is professional and reliable file recovery software that can help you recover deleted files from HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, SD cards, CDs/DVDs, and other file storage devices.
With this tool, you can recover data from hard drives with bad sectors, recover data from a drive with a damaged file system, recover files when the external hard drive shows 0 bytes, etc.
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Wrapping Things Up
In a word, this post shows you how to tell if a hard drive is new or used by checking the hard drive’s physical appearance and checking the disk health via disk test software or CMD.
If you need to recover files, you can try MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free. Should you have any concerns when using it, feel free to send an email to [email protected].
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Shirley graduated from English major and is currently an editor of MiniTool Team. She likes browsing and writing IT-related articles, and is committed to becoming a professional IT problem solver. The topic of her articles are generally about data recovery, data backup, and computer disk management, as well as other IT issues. In spare time, she likes watching movies, hiking and fishing.
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