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New drive test
Posted:
Wed May 20, 2015 12:05 pm
by 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?
Re: New drive test
Posted:
Wed May 20, 2015 12:20 pm
by 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.
Re: New drive test
Posted:
Wed May 20, 2015 12:30 pm
by 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.
Re: New drive test
Posted:
Sun Oct 30, 2016 9:10 am
by 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.
Re: New drive test
Posted:
Sat Nov 05, 2016 5:11 am
by 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