Hard Disk Monitoring

I bought a recertified (by Seagate) drive from one of the 2 better known sellers of such Enterprise drives. I tested it using the Extended Self Test which it passed. It is an 18TB HDD so it took about 20 ours (don't recall exactly). Am now running the Read + Write (deep test) + Read diagnostic. But its only 2 complete after 4 hours and i s showing it will take 197 more hours to complete. Am doing this via a USB 3.0 enclosure which was probably a mistake but its going into a NAS instead of my PC and I was too lazy to open the PC case up.

I read conflicting discussion on whether its necessary to run both tests but it seems if I chose on it should have been the one I am running now. Should I abort? Let it complete? Will it speed up? On the Extended Self Test, it seems the test completed sooner than estimated. Can I expect the same for the current test I am running?

Ideally the combination of hardware and software tests are recommended as suggested at Support -> Frequently Asked Questions -> Hard disk health is low or recently changed or I just installed a new (used) hard disk. How can I perform a deep analysis?
( https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests )

1) Disk -> Short self test
2) Disk -> Extended self test
3) Disk -> Surface test -> Read test
4) Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialize disk surface


But yes, on a high capacity hard disk drive, running all of these may need very long time, especially if an USB connection may limit the performance.

So to save time, in this case I'd recommend to
- select only one from the above mentioned Short self test or Extended self test
- perform the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Read test only
- and if the time allows, Disk menu -> Surface test -> Write+Read test to surely verify that all sectors could be read and written. This is a "light" version of the above mentioned Reinitialize disk surface test (approx 2-3x faster than the Reinitialize disk surface test).


> Am now running the Read + Write (deep test) + Read diagnostic.

This is not really good here as this test has a completely different purpose - and yes, would really need lots of time.
This test designed to refresh an old drive / rarely used drive (pendrive, memory card, backup hard disk and so).
Can be used for a new (empty) drive too, but there are faster tests.

Thank you so much. I did switch to Read-Write. So far so good. 80% and almost there. Takes a long time!