Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives? 348
An anonymous reader writes "Any Slashdot thread about drive failure is loaded with good advice about EOL — but what about the beginning? Do you normally test your new purchases as thoroughly as you test old, suspect drives? Has your testing followed the proverbial 'bathtub' curve of a lot of early failures, but with those that survive the first month surviving for years? And have you had any return problems with new failed drives, because you re-partitioned it, or 'ran Linux,' or used stress-test apps?"
smartmontools (Score:5, Informative)
Set up the smartd.conf file to do the example short-test daily and long-test weekly, and email you when something is fishy. It's a trivial amount of effort, resulting in a significant amount of peace of mind. (In many cases, you'll have some amount of warning before your drive kicks the bucket and it's too late)
Re:SSDs (Score:4, Informative)
We do here at work. We need some modest 120+ TB of storage right now, and 30% of that content is highly dynamic (PostgreSQL databases). Anything but data center quality HDD would be silly, not to mention unreliable as hell and heavily expensive. SSDs are just for laptops or so, not for real data storage requirements.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds more like your hard drive s.m.a.r.t. was useless. The tools can only report what the drive tells it, if smart isn't telling about relocated sectors, resets, or whatever other terrible malfunction then they are left in the dark.
Re:Heh (Score:1, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:4, Informative)
No, not SMART. I did a full range of tests with all suits on top of SMART (surface tests, etc)
The only HDD tool I trust is the ancient one from GRC.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Informative)
My usual routine when a drive starts to go back is to back its data up using dd
ddrescue [gnu.org] is the tool for backing up a failing drive unless you really want to manually check every failed sector read then restart a new dd (skipping to the next sector).
Re:Heh (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly useless... There's a preclear script that many unRAID users use to beat up their drives while monitoring SMART. It doesn't just look at SMART for a thumbs up or down but monitors the various parameters that SMART throws out. Users run this multiple times in a row and find bad drives fairly regularly. I will admit that I've not been running it but judging from the numbers of folks who have been finding it useful and from the fact that warranties seem to be getting ever shorter I may begin doing so. I use a decent number of the 3TB drives that are always going on sale and I'm starting to think I'm tempting fate by not testing them. I've gotten spoiled in that my unRAID box covers my ass in the even of a failure but I see too damn many reports of new drives going toes up to not be concerned. I have 3 drives sitting on the shelf waiting to be loaded and I may beat them up beforehand just to be sure they won't screw me when I least expect it...
Re:Heh (Score:5, Informative)
No, not SMART. I did a full range of tests with all suits on top of SMART (surface tests, etc)
The only HDD tool I trust is the ancient one from GRC.
That is absolutely laughable. Spinrite is about as good at interfacing with a modern drive than an old 16bit dos program trying to sqeeze every ounce of performance out of a 64bit processor. It had it's purpose in its day. These days running it will more likely do more harm than good.
Not to mention that if your drive is at the end of life running a program that is widely known to give it a most horrendous thrashing is probably not a good idea.