Do you recommend burning-in NAS HDD's?

NathanP2007

[H]ard|Gawd
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So I bought a Synology NAS recently and I'll be getting my HDD soon (WD Red 4TB). I haven't owned a NAS before and I have also never burned in a HDD. However in looking around it seems like something that is recommended. Do you recommend that I do it? If so, how do I do it? What program(s) do you recommend to burn in my HDD?

Thanks!
 
I recommend burning in ALL storage devices, period. For Spinners if you want a quick click-and-forget-it, get DBAN or badblocks and run a few sweeps of that. For SSD's, remember that writes are a more precious thing than on spinners, so you may (depending on the drive) want to limit the number of iterations you run on burnin. Most manufacturers also have a drive test and verification app that they supply for testing of their own drives if you wish to go that route instead.
 
I recommend burning in ALL storage devices, period. For Spinners if you want a quick click-and-forget-it, get DBAN or badblocks and run a few sweeps of that. For SSD's, remember that writes are a more precious thing than on spinners, so you may (depending on the drive) want to limit the number of iterations you run on burnin. Most manufacturers also have a drive test and verification app that they supply for testing of their own drives if you wish to go that route instead.

Don't burn in an SSD. That's nonsense. Anyway, the thread's about HDDs, not SSDs so just stick to that. Running a single pass of badblocks or doing a format will take around 10 hours for each drive. Some may find it worthwhile to do 40 or more hours of burning in on a HDD but that's up to you how patient you are.
 
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Don't burn in an SSD. That's nonsense. Anyway, the thread's about HDDs, not SSDs so just stick to that. Running a single pass of badblocks or doing a format will take around 10 hours for each drive. Some may find it worthwhile to do 40 or more hours of burning in on a HDD but that's up to you how patient you are.

Thanks. Just to be clear, what am I looking for when I burn-in my HDD's? Why do people do it? Has it's benefits or reasons been proven to be real by respected individuals/companies?
 
Thanks. Just to be clear, what am I looking for when I burn-in my HDD's? Why do people do it? Has it's benefits or reasons been proven to be real by respected individuals/companies?

You're looking for either an increase in bad sector counts or extremely slow behavior from the drive. Use SMART, make note of the raw values of the drive before you do anything with it, then perform your format or badblocks or DBAN routine, then compare the new SMART numbers. The five to watch most closely are:
  1. SMART ID 5 (0x05): Relocated Sectors Count (aka Reallocated Sector Count)
  2. SMART ID 187 (0xBB): Reported Uncorrectable Errors
  3. SMART ID 188 (0xBC): Command Timeout
  4. SMART ID 197 (0xC5): Current Pending Sector Count
  5. SMART ID 198 (0xC6): Uncorrectable Sector Count

S.M.A.R.T. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The packaging the drive comes in can make a difference. Good retail packaging may be worth the extra cost versus a bare bones drive thrown in a box with a bag of air (Yes, Newegg, I'm talking about you).
 
You're looking for either an increase in bad sector counts or extremely slow behavior from the drive. Use SMART, make note of the raw values of the drive before you do anything with it, then perform your format or badblocks or DBAN routine, then compare the new SMART numbers. The five to watch most closely are:
  1. SMART ID 5 (0x05): Relocated Sectors Count (aka Reallocated Sector Count)
  2. SMART ID 187 (0xBB): Reported Uncorrectable Errors
  3. SMART ID 188 (0xBC): Command Timeout
  4. SMART ID 197 (0xC5): Current Pending Sector Count
  5. SMART ID 198 (0xC6): Uncorrectable Sector Count

S.M.A.R.T. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The packaging the drive comes in can make a difference. Good retail packaging may be worth the extra cost versus a bare bones drive thrown in a box with a bag of air (Yes, Newegg, I'm talking about you).

To be clear, to do that, I need to put the NAS HDD into my PC? Do all that, then take it out and put it into my Synology NAS?
 
To be clear, to do that, I need to put the NAS HDD into my PC? Do all that, then take it out and put it into my Synology NAS?

You'd have to unless your NAS has a shell and has tools like badblocks already loaded.
 
Okay so I have the NAS HDD in my gaming PC, I'm in Disk Management and being prompted with the option to initialize the HDD to access it, with the options of MBR or GPT. Do I initialize it with GPT then run S.M.A.R.T. on it and then run BadBlocks?

And how do I run BadBlocks on my Win10 PC? From the little research I've done it appears to be a Command Prompt type situation?
 
badblocks is a Linux utility. You can make a Linux boot CD or USB of whatever variety you like (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) and it should in there. badblocks used with the -w flag will do a destructive write to all sectors, destroying MBRs, partition and data. -s will show a progress bar, -v will be verbose and output bad sectors to stdout. You would need to identify the drive very carefully; you may wish to disconnect all other drives just so you don't screw up and wipe the wrong one. You'll be using a command something like
badblocks -wsv /sdb/
but the last part identifies which drive and will probably be different. The test will take a very long time, very many hours if not a few days. There's details I'm not covering here very well because it's dinner time now and the search function on these forums is broken at the moment so I can't find what I posted before.
 
Just slap em in and use em!

It's 99.99999999999999% luck of the draw.

I agree... you should have backups of important information before making any hardware change anyways, and most people here are using drives in redundant arrays as it is... if you have that kind of setup, you should be able to mitigate a bad drive, and be able to reasonably replace it with no down time.
 
Put the drives in your NAS and let it build the array. You can run some of the SMART testing tools after the array is done. As long as it doesn't throw any errors you'll probably be fine. If a drive is going to fail, it'll either be bad out of the box, or it'll fail while building the array.
 
A go with dban since its a write and verify process .and then monitor smart to see how if any bad parameters increased
 
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