Test 2tb Hitachi Drives before adding to RAID 5

I'm about to use 6 x2tb Hitachi 5k3000 5400 rpm drives to create a RAID 5 array. I wanted to thoroughly test the drives before going ahead and building the array and putting data onto it. What free tools/apps would you recommend to test the disk before putting them into production. Is there any tools that'll test multiple disks at once?

Thanks!

Server is a IBM x3500 7977 with a Serveraid 8k controller. It's got a verify disk option which takes some 5-6hours on each 2tb disk but I'm not exactly sure what it does. If it checks for bad sectors etc.

I use badblocks (available on any linux livecd) 4 pass read write test. For a 2TB drive this will take around 30 hours. After the test I look at the smart. With badblocks you can test as many drives as you have connected to the system. Just make sure you do not pick the wrong disk since this will destroy any data on the drive.

If you are uncomfortable with linux and want to stick with windows just do a full format and check the smart.

Ok sounds good. So can I run this against all six disks at once?

And having just googled how to check S.M.A.R.T.
Perhaps you can suggest an easy/free method of checking the smart on these drives?

Some motherboards have it build into the BIOS. You would have an option to run a test on your drive.

Drives are connected through the serveraid controller. not accessible via mb bios. I can't recall seeing anything about smart in the controller.. will double check. Any other options if its not in there.

Checked controller bios. nothing related to smart there.. giving a go at hitachi drive test which is supposed to have some tools for SMART

EDIT: of course the hitatchi drive test can't see the drives on the raid controller... just going to do a verify from the adaptec controller on all the disks.. 5hours a drive. ugh.

I've always just created the array and loaded it up, formatted it and loaded it back up a few times while checking the stats on the drive.
This also stresses the drives in the array with the controller so you see if there are any weird issues with disks dropping from the array.

I use the Hitachi extended drive fitness test, it also gives you full SMART info. badblocks is probably more thorough, but it's better than nothing.

The fitness tests generally just run a SMART long test which does read only testing of every sector or most sectors.

Garuda888 said:

Checked controller bios. nothing related to smart there.. giving a go at hitachi drive test which is supposed to have some tools for SMART

EDIT: of course the hitatchi drive test can't see the drives on the raid controller... just going to do a verify from the adaptec controller on all the disks.. 5hours a drive. ugh.

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Don't you have 6 sata ports on your mobo? or 4 even? why not plug them in there to test and then put them back on the raid controller.

tgrimley said:

Don't you have 6 sata ports on your mobo? or 4 even? why not plug them in there to test and then put them back on the raid controller.

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Yup you're right. I can pull each disk and do so. What I got as a suggestion on another board is to run badblocks with the following switches

"badblocks -v -n -b 4096 -p 2 -c 8192 <device>. v - verbose output n - non destructive read/write mode. b - size of blocks in bytes, default is 1024. p - number of passes c - number of blocks to test at once It's helpful to run each one in a separate terminal so you can watch the progress of each one"

I may take your suggestion and just pull the drives and use the windows based tools. Not sure, I think I buggered myself by doing the Verify Disk on the controller. It was supposed to remap bad blocks... BUT it didn't tell me if it had to. it just said Verify Complete.. which is quite unhelpful. Since now I don't know how many if any bad blocks I have.

The SMART should tell you (on a controller that lets you see it).

which is quite unhelpful. Since now I don't know how many if any bad blocks I have.
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After you run badblocks, windows format or whatever program that does tests just look at the SMART data. If you are unfamiliar with SMART use a program like CrystalDiskInfo.