Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive

[Paul Hartman]

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way.  Should be here Wednesday.  I
> have seen some reviews where it would not work right.  I think some of
> it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large.
> Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up
> to the task before putting my data on it.  It's going to be so much
> data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point.  Come on, 2
> to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs.  Really?  lol  Maybe a external drive later on but
> for now, well.
>
> I have heard of bonnie and friends.  I also think dd could do some
> testing too.  Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if
> it holds up?  Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too.  I have
> never used it before.  Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal.

I wouldn't want to torture the drive, but just make sure it works.

What I do: boot parted magic liveCD, run ATA SECURE ERASE on the drive
(you probably need to suspend and awaken your machine to unlock the
drive, the GUI tool in the liveCD does this for you automatically),
that will do factory reformat/low-level reformat, then run SMART full
test which can take many hours. If it survives both of those, and
doesn't make audible clicking noises in the process, I feel confident
that it is in working order.

Those steps are more important if I'm testing a used or refurbished
drive, for a new drive you may want to skip the secure erase and only
do the smart test. If SMART test passes then I don't think there's any
reason to run badblocks, but you can have it run during mkfs if you
want reassurance.