Hard drives break a lot. In fact, it is the part of a computer that breaks most of all. While we cannot prevent them from breaking, we can make sure we got a good new drive to begin with. Before starting to use a new harddrive, it is wise to test it to see if you received one without faults. Especially for big NAS disks that will be holding a lot of your valuable data. For big disks, this will take a long time, but at least you can be sure your new disk is not faulty. 8TB disks will take around 5 days to test, 12TB around 9 days.
Also, if you bought an external drive to shuck it (remove it from the external drive enclosure), run this test before shucking your drive.
If you have multiple drives, plug them in 1 by 1 so you know which drive is which.
Check the drive stats from SMART. Replace /dev/sd* with the correct drive
letter.
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
smartctl -A /dev/sd*
smartctl -t long /dev/sd*
For Western Digital mybook usb drive add -d sat to smartctl.
The smart long test will take ~1000 minutes with 8TB. This test does not give feedback, it seems like it is doing nothing.
To view test results:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sd*
sudo smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sd*
sudo smartctl -d sat -a --tolerance permissive /dev/sd*
This is a complete write and read test, it will destroy all data on the harddrive.
# if mounted, unmount the disk first
sudo umount /dev/sd*
sudo badblocks -b 4096 -wsv /dev/sd*
Example run:
sudo badblocks -b 4096 -wsv /dev/sdg Checking for bad blocks in read-write mode From block 0 to
1953506559 Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x55: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0xff: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x00: done
Reading and comparing: done
Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found. (0/0/0 errors)
This takes approximately 123 hours (5 days) for a 8TB disk.
It is possible to find compression errors with compression on, which would be missed with compression off. Therefore we turn on compression.
zpool create -f -o ashift=12 -O logbias=throughput -O compress=lz4 -O dedup=off -O atime=off -O xattr=sa TESTrunpool /dev/sd*
zpool export TESTrunpool
sudo zpool import -d /dev/disk/by-id TESTrunpool
sudo chmod -R ugo+rw /TESTrunpool
f3write /TESTrunpool && f3read /TESTrunpool
To check for read, write and checksum errors.
zpool scrub TESTrunpool
All tests passed? Great, you have a good drive! Still, don’t forget harddrives break a lot, more then any other part in a computer.
If not, contact the reseller and send it back or get a refund. Write down the serial number and the test results.
8TB wwn-0x5000cca267e4a96d - Passed
8TB wwn-0x5000cca27dc2265e - Passed
8TB wwn-0x5000cca099c4d828 - Failed, 12 -Read errors, non recoverable, drive is
unsafe to use.
8TB wwn-0x5000cca099c4d828 - Failed, CheckSum errors, possibly recoverable,
drive use is not recommended.