On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 12:37 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Howdy, > > I finally bought a 8TB drive. It is used but they claim only a short duration. Still, I want to test it to be sure it is in grade A shape before putting a lot of data on it and depending on it. I am familiar with some tools already. I know about SMART but it is not always 100%. It seems to catch most problems but not all. I'm familiar with dd and writing all zeores or random to it to see if it can in fact write to all the parts of the drive but it is slow. It can take a long time to write and fill up a 8TB drive. Days maybe?? I googled and found a new tool but not sure how accurate it is since I've never used it before. The command is badblocks. It is installed on my system so I'm just curious as to what it will catch that others won't. Is it fast or slow like dd? > > I plan to run the SMART test anyway. It'll take several hours but I'd like to run some other test to catch errors that SMART may miss. If there is such a tool that does that. If you bought a used drive, what would you run other than the long version of SMART and its test? Would you spend the time to dd the whole drive? Would badblocks be a better tool? Is there another better tool for this? > > While I'm at it, when running dd, I have zero and random in /dev. Where does a person obtain a one? In other words, I can write all zeros, I can write all random but I can't write all ones since it isn't in /dev. Does that even exist? Can I create it myself somehow? Can I download it or install it somehow? I been curious about that for a good long while now. I just never remember to ask. > > When I add this 8TB drive to /home, I'll have 14TBs of space. If I leave the 3TB drive in instead of swapping it out, I could have about 17TBs of space. O_O > > Thanks to all. > > Dale > > :-) :-)
The SMART test, long version, will do a very reasonable job catching problems. Run it 2 or 3 times if it makes you feel better. Chris's suggestion about Spinrite is another option but it is slow, slow, slow. Might take you weeks? On a drive that large if it worked at all. As an aside, but important, I fear that you're possibly falling into the trap most of us do at home. Please don't. Once you have 17TB of space on your system how are you planning on doing your weekly backups? Do you have 17TB+ on an external drive or system? Will you back up to BlueRay discs or something like that? Mark
