Am I just an idiot here? What are up with my sustained reads?

Why wipe? The smart tests are not destructive. Seems like you ran them already? And no errors.


But… if you want to really stress test them, here’s a good utility: GitHub - Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing: Shell script for burn-in and testing of new or re-purposed drives

Since it seems you already ran the SMART tests you can just do badblocks alone. Keep in mind it’ll take like a week per drive. (Tho you can of course run multiple drives in parallel.)
Note: badblocks will destroy every last shred of data on the drives. If they’re close to failure it will probably make them fail.

P.S. If you do decide to run badblocks - consider switching your drives over to 4K and running a speed test like discussed in this thread: Why are hard drive sectors still 512 bytes by default? The tests themselves take like 30-40 min to run at most (incl. switching the sector size). And it would be really helpful if we had more data points. (Also note, since you’re using a RAID card, not sure sure how well those play together with 4K drives - you would have to check.)