When looking for large new drives (>= 1 TB) on newegg and the like, I note a number of reviews talking about drives being either D.O.A. or hitting the Click of Death (or even releasing the Magic Smoke) within a week or so of use. A portion of the reviews mention this phenomenon whether the drive in question is Western Digital or Hitachi or whatever.

For those of you using Windows, what do you to:

1) Place a large initial stress on the drive to see if it can take it? For how long?

2) Test the drive afterwards (presumably with some sort of S.M.A.R.T. tool or others) to see if any negative changes have been noted?

Note: This is one component of a larger plan for both high-availability and backups for my home data.