Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives?
An anonymous reader writes "Any Slashdot thread about drive failure is loaded with good advice about EOL — but what about the beginning? Do you normally test your new purchases as thoroughly as you test old, suspect drives? Has your testing followed the proverbial 'bathtub' curve of a lot of early failures, but with those that survive the first month surviving for years? And have you had any return problems with new failed drives, because you re-partitioned it, or 'ran Linux,' or used stress-test apps?"
Set up the smartd.conf file to do the example short-test daily and long-test weekly, and email you when something is fishy. It's a trivial amount of effort, resulting in a significant amount of peace of mind. (In many cases, you'll have some amount of warning before your drive kicks the bucket and it's too late)
What you want is just 'badblocks -w '.
My usual routine when a drive starts to go back is to back its data up using dd
ddrescue is the tool for backing up a failing drive unless you really want to manually check every failed sector read then restart a new dd (skipping to the next sector).
No, not SMART. I did a full range of tests with all suits on top of SMART (surface tests, etc)
The only HDD tool I trust is the ancient one from GRC.
That is absolutely laughable. Spinrite is about as good at interfacing with a modern drive than an old 16bit dos program trying to sqeeze every ounce of performance out of a 64bit processor. It had it's purpose in its day. These days running it will more likely do more harm than good.
Not to mention that if your drive is at the end of life running a program that is widely known to give it a most horrendous thrashing is probably not a good idea.