On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 3:54 PM Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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.
Is spinrite really still of any use in this era? I'm skeptical of that. Maybe in the pre-IDE days it made more sense. I'd echo the SMART test. If you don't want to trust the vendor then I run: badblocks -b 4096 -v -w -s /dev/disk/by-id/... Note that this is a DESTRUCTIVE write test. There are also non-destructive read-only tests but obviously this is more limited in capability. It will write a series of patterns to the disk and read them back. Barring some really clever firmware it should detect any kind of media error. I think there might be software that writes pseudo-random patterns and then reads them back, which would defeat any firmware fiddling. For a drive in the 10-12TB size you're talking about a day or so per pass, so 4 passes will take a few days. Can't get around 12TB / (120MB/s). If I'm not in a hurry to use the space I'll still do it as nothing is worse than starting to migrate onto a drive and then having to back out, and that is with redundant data. -- Rich
