Just bought 5 used 8TB Ultrastar drives on ebay for only $35 each. Heck of a deal right? Checked smart info and everything looks good. Of course i know it would be a good idea to do a complete scan for bad sectors but I don’t know the best program for that. Ideally a free win10 program that i could test all 5 at once connected to one pc

  • HTWingNut@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    WD has the “WD Dashboard” utility that will allow you to run a LONG SMART test.

  • Barafu@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Any drive made this side of year 2000 will check itself when reading, so all you need is to fill it with junk data and open it, then delete.

  • caskey@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    None. Modern drives reallocate bad sectors so the only important metric I look at is remaining spare sectors.

  • binaryriot@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    If out of other options just do a simply zero format (e.g. diskutil zeroDisk diskX on macOS), and a long SMART test afterwards (e.g. smartctl -t long diskX). That’s what I do with my new disks and it served me well so far. For large capacity disks it is like a heavy 2 day process (1 day formatting, 1 day testing), but it gives me a piece of mind afterwards.


    Extra Hint: During any SMART long test make sure to disable disk sleep in your OS for the time, else test will abort (e.g. caffeinate -m on macOS). Also avoid crappy external enclosures that put the disks to sleep by themselves (or you may want to run a script that regularly reads a block from the disk to keep it awake.)

    Here’s my macOS script to handle the job (I needed it recently because a temporary crappy USB enclosure). It reads a block every 2 minutes via raw I/O w/o caching involved (“/dev/rdisk”)

    #!/bin/bash
    # $Id: keepdiskawake 64 2023-10-29 01:55:56Z tokai $
    
    if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    	echo "keepdiskawake: required argument required (disk identifier, volume name, or volume path)." 1>&2
    	exit 1
    fi
    
    MY_DISKID=`diskutil info "${1}" | awk '/Device Identifier:/ {print $3}'`
    
    if [[ ! -z "${MY_DISKID-}" ]]; then
    	printf '\033[35mPoking disk \033[1m"%s"\033[22m with identifier \033[1m"%s"\033[22m…\033[0m\n' "${MY_DISKNAME}" "${MY_DISKID}"
    	MY_RDISKID="/dev/r${MY_DISKID}"
    	echo "CTRL-C to quit"
    	while true; do
    		echo -n .
    		dd if="${MY_RDISKID}" of="/dev/null" count=1 2>/dev/null
    		sleep 120
    	done
    else
    	echo "keepdiskawake: Couldn't determine disk identifier for \"${1}\"." 1>&2
    	exit 1
    fi
    
  • pjkm123987@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    you need to do a full read and write on the disk. use a program to write the disk full of 0s and then verify read. UNRAId does this with its preclear function.