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

On 2020/06/15 at 11:07am, Dale wrote:

> I finally bought a 8TB drive.  It is used but they claim only a short
> duration.  Still, I want to test it to be sure it is in grade A shape
> before putting a lot of data on it and depending on it.  I am familiar
> with some tools already.  I know about SMART but it is not always 100%. 
> It seems to catch most problems but not all.  I'm familiar with dd and
> writing all zeores or random to it to see if it can in fact write to all
> the parts of the drive but it is slow. It can take a long time to write
> and fill up a 8TB drive. Days maybe??  I googled and found a new tool
> but not sure how accurate it is since I've never used it before.  The
> command is badblocks.  It is installed on my system so I'm just curious
> as to what it will catch that others won't.  Is it fast or slow like dd?

If you have a few days, I'd run spinrite
(https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) on it. It is very slow but very
good at checking and repairing disks. (Gibson is working on an updated
version that will be much, much faster.) No joke that you would have to
leave the current version running for several days (at least) for an 8TB
drive, if you ran the most comprehensive test.

Aside from time, the drawback is that spinrite costs money.

I've used badblocks and it is not fast, but not nearly as slow as
spinrite. IIRC, it took maybe a few hours for a 250GB drive. That said,
I've been lucky not to have a huge number of problems with drives, so I
can't say how much either has helped.

-- 
Chris Spackman                                      chris@××××××××××.com

ESL Coordinator 		            The Graham Family of Schools
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