this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Must do's for a new hard drive (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Here is a fairly robust way to ensure a drive safe to put into service. I have tested this before and caught drives that would have failed shortly after put into prod, and some that would of after it was more than half full.

  1. Check S.M.A.R.T Info: Confirm no (0) Seek Error Rate, Read Error Rate, Reallocated Sector Count, Uncorrectable Sector Count

  2. Run Short S.M.A.R.T test

  3. Repeat Step 1

  4. Run Conveyance S.M.A.R.T test

  5. Repeat Step 1

  6. Run Destructive Badblocks test (read and write)

  7. Repeat Step 1

  8. Perform a FULL Format (Overwrite with Zeros)

  9. Repeat Step 1

  10. Run Extended S.M.A.R.T test

  11. Repeat Step 1

Return the drive if either of the following is true:

A) The formatting speed drops below 80MB/s by more than 10MB/s (my defective one was ~40MB/s from first power-on)

B) The S.M.A.R.T tests show error count increasing at any step

It is also highly advisable to stagger the testing (and repeat some) if you plan on using multiple drives in a pool/raid config. This way the wear on the drives differ, to reduce the likelihood of them failing at the same time. For example, I re-ran either the Full format or badblocks test on some of the drives so some drives have 48 hours of testing, some have 72, some have 96. This way, the chances of a multiple drive failures during rebuild is lower.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Way Overkill.

Single pass read (SMART test is fine) and single pass write (ones, zeros, random, whatever you want) is more than adequate to determine any issues a new disk may have out of the gate, unless you want to isolate a fringe case condition and waste time and wear on your hard drive doing so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

For real. I suppose if you kept one single copy of the drive you'd want to really, really make sure? But then again why would you keep one copy of anything?

TLDR: smart is smort enuf

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I do it the other way around: first write (zero wipe), then read (SMART long test). Served me well for many disks. :)