HuntsMan75 wrote:
I'm looking for advice on a) drives for this system, b)repair instructions or online guides, c) test/evaluation software.
Any SATA drive that will physically fit in the system will do. Unless that's a really odd or abormally shaped drive, that should be about anything. The newer the drive is the better it will almost always be.
Stay away from refurbished units unless you like to gamble. Most refurbished units are not refurbished at all but rather overstocks of replacement drives a manufacturer held on to fullfill warranty obligations. Once the line is discontinued they dump these, *****BUT*****, and this is the critical part - Some manufacturers also use the "refurbished" definition to apply to units that are defective that they want to unload and they're aware the defects won't kick in or be noticable until the reduced warranty on the unit (usually 30 days) has expired.
iFixit.com is a good site, but if you hunt several sites on the web actually have online manuals and guides that can be of assistance too.
As far as test software goes I've been a long advocate of Scannerz on this site for some time. I work very closely with the people that run the company so my favoritism to their products is hardly biased.
If I may offer an opinion, FSE and FSE-Lite aren't for everyone. What it does is register and report on every file system event modification going on in the system. In other words if you delete a file, it will report it. If a file has its contents changed, it will report it. If a file once owned by you has it's owership changed by someone/something else, it will report it...and it will also report which process did it and who owned it at the time. As you might guess, this application can be used for security and backtracking things going on in a system.
It was included with Scannerz originally I suspect to track excesssive Spotlight activity. Earlier versions of Spotlight would create hundreds of thousands of file modificatons in a minute or so, leaving people with the notioin that their hard drive was failing. It wasn't, it was just being saturated with work by Spotlight (you'll notice this company also sells a Spotlight controller called SpotOff). The fact is any drive intensive program can do likewise (mimic hard drive failure) and FSE and FSE-LIte can expose the difference.
If you don't need or understand FSE/FSE-Lite, my advice would be to go with the Scannerz with FSE-Lite package. I would pick that over the Lite version of Scannerz because it allows cursory mode testing. Although the documentation says cursory mode is primarily for confirming problems, the fact is you can attach any drive to a system and use it just to verify that the drive is working without having it log the drive to the system or register it's files. To me, that itself is worth the price difference.