More fragile disk drives often carry five-year coverage. It is likely that your storage areas are filled with many thousands of dollars' worth of defective equipment that can be replaced under warranty. An old 133MHz Pentium system with SCSI and IDE controllers allows a fairly quick diagnosis of virtually all my hard drives. After carefully culling and storing the working drives for future use, I turn my attention to the problem units. Disk vendors such as Quantum and Seagate typically supply diagnostic software on their Web sites that allows you to determine if your drives are indeed defective.
Memory chips are trickier.
I bet that virtually every IS department has SIMMs and DIMMs of every type, unsorted and unidentified, stuffed into coffee cans. Figuring out memory capacity and configuration of unmarked chips can be time-consuming. One approach is to stick chips into systems and hope that the BIOS can correctly identify the memory type. Not only is this inefficient, but there are also few provisions to quickly test the chips themselves. A computer's POST initialization may only perform a memory checksum.