Testing Refurbished Drives for SMART Errors

[Jeremy1998]

Hi guys, I've got 3 refurbished HGST Ultrastar's, with 3 more on the way, and I want to make sure they're in working condition before the return periods expire. 

 

What is a good USB bootable software to do a complete read write test to the drive to stress it and verify no dead sectors? I've read about Hiren's Boot CD, and Ultimate Boot CD. Would either of those be a good option, and if so what application within them should I use?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

I don't know about you... but I would never touch a refurbished hard drive. Storage is one of the things you don't want to by refurbished because loosing data sucks.

[SCHISCHKA]

you can use any linux live cd. Debian and ubuntu come with GUI programs to test and benchmark discs

[Jeremy1998]

10 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

I don't know about you... but I would never touch a refurbished hard drive. Storage is one of the things you don't want to by refurbished because loosing data sucks.

I totally understand where you're coming from, but I'm going to run them in a software raid 6 so I'm not as afraid of a drive failure. Plus these are 3tb server class drives from HGST, and with the regular desktop 3tb drives are famously reliable from Backblaze's reports. In my dreams this would be brand new 4-10tb drives, but I'm far too broke for that. My current setup has absolutely no backup or redundancy, so I'm just glad to have a raid 6. 

Just now, SCHISCHKA said:

you can use any linux live cd. Debian and ubuntu come with GUI programs to test and benchmark discs

Can that do a full on read/write to the drive to stress it? And where do I find these features? Will it just be an option on the right click menu for the hard drive? I'm a super noob to linux, so please excuse the dumb questions. 

[SCHISCHKA]

3 minutes ago, Jeremy1998 said:

Can that do a full on read/write to the drive to stress it? And where do I find these features? Will it just be an option on the right click menu for the hard drive? I'm a super noob to linux, so please excuse the dumb questions. 

on ubuntu or debian press the windows key and type disks. click the icon that comes up. This is the Gnome disks manager. This will open a program that will show all your drives. Select a drive then in the top right of the window is a menu button; from there you can choose SMART or benchmark.

Yes you can do full read & write tests from a live cd.

[Jeremy1998]

2 hours ago, SCHISCHKA said:

on ubuntu or debian press the windows key and type disks. click the icon that comes up. This is the Gnome disks manager. This will open a program that will show all your drives. Select a drive then in the top right of the window is a menu button; from there you can choose SMART or benchmark.

Yes you can do full read & write tests from a live cd.

Awesome, that's exactly the level of instructions I needed. I'm running the SMART test on my drives now. Thank you so much!

[Jarsky]

Just bear in mind that SMART doesnt indicate the overall health of the drive.

 

My old NAS drives all show 'healthy' in SMART, yet they have 55000hrs+ and a couple of them are extremely slow and one is faulting.

Also I just got a refurbished WD Red drive - it faulted and files corrupted on it. In SMART the pending sector count was increasing, but re-zeroing the drive returns the SMART status back to healthy until the drive faults again.

 

Just make sure that you do some validation the RAID for some time before using it for data that you don't have a backup of. I've found that disks can take up to ~2 weeks to show issues.

[Jeremy1998]

On 4/15/2017 at 4:42 AM, Jarsky said:

Just make sure that you do some validation the RAID for some time before using it for data that you don't have a backup of. I've found that disks can take up to ~2 weeks to show issues.

How do I do that type of check? I'm assuming I use some program that will write to the array, then read it back and run a checksum to make sure the data is correct?