I have never had badblocks find any bad sectors without some of the SMART parameters also indicating trouble. Now, the SMART parameters rarely officially fail, but looking at the raw values of certain parameters, it is clear that they incremented during the badblocks run. And when I RMA such a drive, I have never had the manufacturer reject the RMA.
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Stress Test New Hard Drives - Suggestions?
- Thread starter raiderj
- Start date
I have never had badblocks find any bad sectors without some of the SMART parameters also indicating trouble. Now, the SMART parameters rarely officially fail, but looking at the raw values of certain parameters, it is clear that they incremented during the badblocks run. And when I RMA such a drive, I have never had the manufacturer reject the RMA.
Bill McGonigle explains very well the difference you need to know:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/22505
Some interesting stuff in there for sure, but essentially everyone's comments can be distilled down to the same thing: back when spinrite came out (25+ years ago) it could do things that no other software of the time could do. These days, essentially all of the special stuff the spinrite did is actually built into the disk controller on the drive itself anyways. So yeah, a tool like badblocks should be able to do anything that spinrite can on a modern system. I would be curious to see if someone has any actual results where spinrite could find something that a tool like badblocks couldn't, although, honestly, I highly doubt that such a case exists.
You are wrong!That is not because Spinrite is doing something magic. For testing HDDs, badblocks can do the same thing as Spinrite. There is no magic occurring. It is simply writing and reading the sectors.
No.If you replaced Spinrite with badblocks in your sequence, the result would be the same. It is just a matter of order of tests -- you have Spinrite last. If you put badblocks last, it would perform similarly.
[I am a little "conflicted" here--I don't mean to defend SpinRite.--it is obsolete/overhyped] But, it does do more than badblocks. The shortcoming of badblocks is that (true to its name) it only reports bad blocks (sectors). [And, it doesn't even report all of them.]
Just because a sector isn't bad, doesn't mean it is good ...
--UhClem
You are wrong!
I am right.
I don't know whether this has been mentioned yet, but your first full linear pass for testing a new drive should be a read pass, not a write pass.
You want to find bad sectors before the drive has an opportunity to re-map them. If you write first the drive will remap bad sectors. You can still dig out the count from the SMART info but a honest to god hanging and then read error is much better and you can stop bothering with the drive right there.
You want to find bad sectors before the drive has an opportunity to re-map them. If you write first the drive will remap bad sectors. You can still dig out the count from the SMART info but a honest to god hanging and then read error is much better and you can stop bothering with the drive right there.
I don't know whether this has been mentioned yet, but your first full linear pass for testing a new drive should be a read pass, not a write pass.
You want to find bad sectors before the drive has an opportunity to re-map them. If you write first the drive will remap bad sectors. You can still dig out the count from the SMART info but a honest to god hanging and then read error is much better and you can stop bothering with the drive right there.
Oops, I wrote that! You are right: the correct sequence is
1) S.M.A.R.T. tests
2) read
3) write
4) S.M.A.R.T. tests again
5) compare differences between step 1 and 4.
Oops, I wrote that! You are right: the correct sequence is
1) S.M.A.R.T. tests
2) read
3) write
4) S.M.A.R.T. tests again
5) compare differences between step 1 and 4.
Yes, sorry I echoed you, I was just making sure it's in here somewhere.
You should haveOops, I wrote that! You are right: the correct sequence is
1) S.M.A.R.T. tests
2) read
3) write
4) S.M.A.R.T. tests again
5) compare differences between step 1 and 4.
2.5) SMART tests
or you might lose useful info about drive problems, if you wait for 4).
--UhClem
By the way, the SMART parameters that I usually check (raw values) are: Reallocated Sector Count, Current Pending Sector, and Offline Uncorrectable. I also sometimes look at End-to-End Error, Hardware ECC Recovered, UDMA CRC Error Count, Multi Zone Error Rate. Not all drives have all of those secondary parameters.
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My temp drives completed the badblocks scan without error. Took ~47 hours for the 3TB drives to do the full scan, and at the end there weren't any SMART errors that I found, mainly looking at the sector counts for reallocation.
I am seeing two of the drives reporting values for "Throughput_Performance" and "Seek Time Performance", but that doesn't seem to be an error description as much as simply showing activity.
Next I'm going to copy my data over to these drives, then replace the originals with new 4TB drives in a RAIDz2. The originals were in a RAIDz1, so to my knowledge there isn't a way to migrate the array type. I don't have enough SATA ports to just do a single swap :-(
I am seeing two of the drives reporting values for "Throughput_Performance" and "Seek Time Performance", but that doesn't seem to be an error description as much as simply showing activity.
Next I'm going to copy my data over to these drives, then replace the originals with new 4TB drives in a RAIDz2. The originals were in a RAIDz1, so to my knowledge there isn't a way to migrate the array type. I don't have enough SATA ports to just do a single swap :-(