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 [email protected] ESL Coordinator The Graham Family of Schools ESL Instructor Columbus State Community College Japan Exchange and Teaching Program Wajima, Ishikawa 1995-1998 Linux user since 1998 Linux User #137532
