Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives?

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Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives?

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 23, 2012 @05:22AM from the just-bite-the-corner-a-little dept.

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?"

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Heh by Deekin_Scalesinger · 2012-12-23 05:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

Like, never. Out of the box and away she goes...good luck to thee!

--
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
1. Re:Heh by JMJimmy · 2012-12-23 06:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Add to the above:
  HDD tools are useless. I recently tried a bunch of them - they all reported my HDD in perfect condition... while it was doing the click of death. HDD failed within a week.
2. Re:Heh by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-23 12:38 · Score: 0, Insightful
  
  It had it's purpose in its day.
  Apostrophes are hard.
Re:SSDs by roc97007 · 2012-12-23 05:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

> Who cares about HDDs anymore these days?
Anyone with a need for a massive amount of storage space.

--
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Re:SSDs by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-23 05:37 · Score: 0, Insightful

The massive storage requirements cause massive backup time, making a RAID setup of some kind necessary. At which point a dying disk now and then no longer is an issue.
Re:SSDs by White+Flame · 2012-12-23 05:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not really. People usually don't modify gigantic footprints of data per day, so standard incremental backup strategies are still very applicable. Most of the large data tends to be read-only over time, typically media, archives, large installation files, etc.
Re:SSDs by aaarrrgggh · 2012-12-23 06:29 · Score: 3, Insightful

Rebuild time. It takes our hardware raids about 24 hours to rebuild, and software raids about 72 hours. If the disk failure isn't detected immediately, even with RAID-6 you are pushing your luck.
RAID is not backup.
Re:SSDs by PlusFiveTroll · 2012-12-23 06:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

Depending on your definition of reliable and long term, people still use tapes.
Wrong Approach by nuckfuts · 2012-12-23 08:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

I've been dealing with hardware failures for 20+ years. What I've learned is that disasters WILL happen, regardless of what preventive measures are in place. So I shifted my focus toward recoverablity. To me, the important question is "When something catastrophic happens, how quickly and easily can I put things back in working order"?
Since I use RAID where appropriate, and more importantly, I am positively fanatic about frequent, full, and tested backups, the only concern I have when a hard drive dies is whether I'm still entitled to a warranty replacement.