New drive test

[realfolkblues12]

Hey everybody. Got a new drive. Before the return period is up with amazon wanted to do a break in test. What I came up with is create a new single drive pool on it. Then fill it to the brim with data. after that run a scrub to see if there are any errors.

I'm curious what you all do when testing a new drive for defects?

[ilovezfs]

I like to make sure I can dd zeros to the entire device (or Disk Utility.app secure erase with the zeros option).

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskN bs=4096


It goes without saying, but don't put in the wrong disk number.

[realfolkblues12]

yeah thats kinda what i was doing but using random bits dd if=/dev/random | split -b500m
I figured if the data is random it's a better check because if the drive reads the wrong area and it's all zeros it will come up with the correct data anyways?
But i don't know if thats true just my conjecture.

[Sharko]

An easy test that I do is to run the SMART long test on each drive. Some of the retail SMART monitoring software makes that a click and go operation; I really like DriveDX from binaryfruit.com for this purpose, especially because it comes with a SMART driver that works with most external drive enclosures (not sure about multi disk enclosures, probably won't work them). I've had good luck with single disk USB enclosures, however.

[macz]

Install Brew on you osx machine

Brew install a command line smart package, there are a couple you can choose from...

Run a smartctl test that will write mixed data to the drive, it will use all sectors


Get the smart info for the drive, it will show if it required to reallocate sectors to properly write the data

Just writing the data correctly does not guarantee that the drive does not have a bad section of platter

If you really want to have fun

Download digitaloyds (sp?) tools.... that will fill the drive and record read/wire speeds for each sector to a file that you can drag to the included spreadsheet that will graph drive performance so you can see again if there are areas of the drive where it struggles to get a clean read/write

You can also create a ubuntu boot usb and run ubuntu from the stick, download the smart and monitoring packages and off you go... same thing different os