I agree with the rest of the advice here. Drives, even large ones are relatively inexpensive these days. It certainly is a good idea to test them before putting them to critical use. When I set up my 24TB RAID with SoftRAID, I took each of the three 12TB drives and ran them through SoftRAID's test. It took a WEEK for each one! However, it's now done and I can feel reasonably secure (for now). The single most important thing though, of course, it having an effective backup system. With effective backup, it really doesn't matter if a drive fails. It's annoying, costs money, and more importantly expends time, but if properly set up, no data will be lost. DATA is all that matters; redundancy is the solution. All drives will fail, some sooner, some later. I had one fail in a year, and I've got some that are 15 years old and still running (in non-critical areas). There are two kinds of people, those who back up and those who will lose data. Be the former, not the latter.