Mark Knecht wrote: > > > On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 12:37 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com > <mailto:rdalek1...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > > > Howdy, > > > > 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? > > > > I plan to run the SMART test anyway. It'll take several hours but > I'd like to run some other test to catch errors that SMART may miss. > If there is such a tool that does that. If you bought a used drive, > what would you run other than the long version of SMART and its test? > Would you spend the time to dd the whole drive? Would badblocks be a > better tool? Is there another better tool for this? > > > > While I'm at it, when running dd, I have zero and random in /dev. > Where does a person obtain a one? In other words, I can write all > zeros, I can write all random but I can't write all ones since it > isn't in /dev. Does that even exist? Can I create it myself > somehow? Can I download it or install it somehow? I been curious > about that for a good long while now. I just never remember to ask. > > > > When I add this 8TB drive to /home, I'll have 14TBs of space. If I > leave the 3TB drive in instead of swapping it out, I could have about > 17TBs of space. O_O > > > > Thanks to all. > > > > Dale > > > > :-) :-) > > 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. > > As an aside, but important, I fear that you're possibly falling into > the trap most of us do at home. Please don't. Once you have 17TB of > space on your system how are you planning on doing your weekly > backups? Do you have 17TB+ on an external drive or system? Will you > back up to BlueRay discs or something like that? > > Mark
Way back, we used Spinrite to test drives. Think mid 90's. Yea, it was slow then on what today is a tiny hard drive. Can't imagine modern drive sizes. It is good tho. It reads/writes every single part of a drive. It will generally find fault if there is one. Right now, I'm backing up to a 8TB external drive, sadly it is a SMR drive but it works. As I go along, I'll be breaking down my backups. Example. I may have my Documents directory, which includes my camera pics, backed up to one drive. I may have videos backed up to another drive. Other directories may have to be on other drives. The biggest things I don't want to lose: Camera pics that could not be replaced except with a backup. Videos, some of which are no longer available. That requires a large drive. It currently is approaching 6TBs and I have several videos in other locations that are not included in that. Documents which would be hard to recreate. Since I have all my emails locally, I don't want to lose those either. Just a bit ago, I was searching for posts regarding smartctl. I got quite a few hits. Even if I build a NAS setup, I still need a backup arrangement. Even if I have a RAID setup, still need backups. It gets complicated for sure. Sort of expensive too. Just imagine if my DSL was 10 times faster. O_O I'd need to order drives by the case. Dale :-) :-)
