I recently picked up a couple of Seagate 1.5TB hard drives and based on the reviews I wanted to conduct an EXTENSIVE burn on each drive (a number of people have reported these drives suffered from the “click of death”). There are various tools to read and write data to a drive, but the most thorough tool I’ve found for Linux is preclear_disk.sh. Preclear writes a bunch of data to the drives, and checks to make sure the data read matches the data that was written (it writes out a special signature to assist with this). It also monitors hard drive SMART counters, and will report errors as it detects them. Cool tool, and highly recommended!