HD testing software

[porina]

I guess I'm a bit out of the loop on HD testing software, but could use some again as I look to upgrade my NAS. Yesterday I got a Seagate 8TB drive, and before adding it to the NAS I wanted to test it. Easy right? A bit less so than hoped.

 

I use Unraid and they recommended full surface read-write-read cycles before use. I'm a bit impatient so I'm skipping the first read, which is intended to catch pending sectors and give the drive a chance to remap on write. A blind write plus read should be fine if there are no pending sectors.

 

I went to my go-to software: WD Data Lifeguard Tools. Except I couldn't, as it had been EOL'd. I eventually found it on a 3rd party website which always makes me feel dirty, but the one I used is the web part of a popular tech channel so the risks are lower. Why the WD one? It lets you simply select a full surface read or write. Seagate's software is a mess and even looking at the help it doesn't explain what each option does. I dodged a bullet as what I thought was a simple surface write that I was looking for seemed to be closer to a secure erase for SSDs, which makes the drive unusable until it completes.

 

Of free software, I still use HDD scan. I find it good for reads but it seems a bit weird on writes.

 

Is there any free software that can test multiple drives in parallel? I'm looking at 15h a pass so doing one disk at a time is going to be incredibly slow unless I do something messy like use multiple systems. Should work on drives without a filesystem. I'm now wondering if dban could do it? Haven't used that in a long time.

[mariushm]

Read the documentation on WD lifeguard, it may be writing 0s multiple times on each sector, but I'm not sure. It's a lot of time since I used it.

 

If your Seagate drive is SMR, the write speeds can fluctuate, and not be great, because each time it writes a track it has to read adjacent tracks and write them back to the surface. 

[porina]

37 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Read the documentation on WD lifeguard, it may be writing 0s multiple times on each sector, but I'm not sure. It's a lot of time since I used it.

Erase is a simple zero drive. I don't need or want any more than that which is why I like it.

 

37 minutes ago, mariushm said:

If your Seagate drive is SMR, the write speeds can fluctuate, and not be great, because each time it writes a track it has to read adjacent tracks and write them back to the surface. 

Irrelevant to the question asked.

[Kilrah]

Why are you not doing it with the Unassigned Devices Preclear plugin on unraid? Everything you need is there, and once it's done you can add to array directly instead of waiting for yet another zero pass.

[porina]

9 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Why are you not doing it with the Unassigned Devices Preclear plugin on unraid? Everything you need is there, and once it's done you can add to array directly instead of waiting for yet another zero pass.

I probably looked at this in the distant past and decided I didn't want to bother with 3rd party plugins to unraid itself. If it was stand alone Windows application that would be fine. I do want to experiment with the drive in Windows before using it in Unraid anyway. Arguably I could have done that before preclearing, but I get some useful data from the manual method I'm using right now.

 

I think the addition of a new drive also works like a parity check which I haven't done in forever either.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I think the addition of a new drive also works like a parity check

If you've precleared with the plugin it gets added instantly, if not the drive itself gets zeroed without the others being touched, and isn't available until it's done.

 

1 hour ago, porina said:

decided I didn't want to bother with 3rd party plugins to unraid itself.

 

There are several Unraid plugins that are so essential that they should IMO be baked into the OS itself, running without plugins is limiting yourself a lot.

7.0 beta that just dropped does bring in a couple as native which is good but not that one.

[porina]

49 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

If you've precleared with the plugin it gets added instantly, if not the drive itself gets zeroed without the others being touched, and isn't available until it's done.

Is that the case? Thought it does the clearing in the background, but it has been a very long time since I did that so I can't be sure.

 

49 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

There are several Unraid plugins that are so essential that they should IMO be baked into the OS itself, running without plugins is limiting yourself a lot.

7.0 beta that just dropped does bring in a couple as native which is good but not that one.

I don't follow developments that closely. I just dump files on it now and then and don't look at any features beyond that. Randomly I might hit the check for updates button.

 

BTW disk was 98% done last time I checked up on it. The speed drop off is rather steeper at the end than I'd like. I'm seeing around 85MB/s at the end of the disk. I guess it still balances out to give the 150MB/s whole disk average I reported elsewhere, as it is near 200MB/s at the start. To get the average down it has to be lower elsewhere. I'm now questioning my acceptability of ~85MB/s transfers. I never tested my existing disks in this way so I have no idea how fast they are at the end for comparison.