We've been over this on the last thread you made that got locked because
you refuse to listen to reason - these scrap HDDs you got from China are
not reliable or trustworthy. Give up on them, or just store your data on them - it's clearly not important if you're so hellbent on using these sketchy drives to begin with. Otherwise, you're just looking for something or someone to blame if the inevitable happens.
HDDScan is pretty good as it includes a variety of tests. That said it's unlikely to find issues not discovered with a surface scan. Of course you can always create your own test by writing and verifying data to the disk yourself. Filling the drive up with real data will be more rigorous then a surface scan and the HDD will automatically mark bad sectors.
Will a surface scan generate more bad sectors? Only if the drive is already dying. It cannot harm a healthy drive. Using any failing drive could potentially increase it's number of bad sectors and that has more to do with use than something a surface scan is doing.
For context: OP first made a thread asking about long-term data archival contexts for important files a few weeks ago. Refused to listen to any reasonable advice, claimed they had no money to do any of that. Then last week, claimed their "brother" had purchased some discount HDD enclosure from China and had some grave concerns about their reliability. Turns out it was some 9 year old HGST laptop drive chucked in some really poor enclosure, with signs of SMART data tampering because the HDD was clearly used but SMART data couldn't be read - it was just blank. We told them that their drive was unreliable.
Then they insisted that they would not replace the drives, admitted that they had ordered it themselves and fully intended to make long term backups on them -
completely disregarding our advice on the subject. Not only that, reading last thread it seems they
decided to double down on it and ordered another one. (really?) That thread, too, got locked. Enter this thread. Just don't humor this dude, they were never willing to listen to what any of us have to say.
