Re: [gentoo-user] Testing a used hard drive to make SURE it is good.

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 3:54 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> The SMART test, long version, will do a very reasonable job catching problems. Run it 2 or 3 times if it makes you feel better.
>
> Chris's suggestion about Spinrite is another option but it is slow, slow, slow. Might take you weeks? On a drive that large if it worked at all.

Is spinrite really still of any use in this era?  I'm skeptical of
that.  Maybe in the pre-IDE days it made more sense.

I'd echo the SMART test.  If you don't want to trust the vendor then I run:
badblocks -b 4096 -v -w -s /dev/disk/by-id/...

Note that this is a DESTRUCTIVE write test.  There are also
non-destructive read-only tests but obviously this is more limited in
capability.  It will write a series of patterns to the disk and read
them back.  Barring some really clever firmware it should detect any
kind of media error.  I think there might be software that writes
pseudo-random patterns and then reads them back, which would defeat
any firmware fiddling.

For a drive in the 10-12TB size you're talking about a day or so per
pass, so 4 passes will take a few days.  Can't get around 12TB /
(120MB/s).  If I'm not in a hurry to use the space I'll still do it as
nothing is worse than starting to migrate onto a drive and then having
to back out, and that is with redundant data.

-- 
Rich