Hi all, I recently purchased 6 used Ultrastar 2tb drives, and I'd like to test them to make sure they're trustworthy before the return period expires.
I'm looking for some sort of software, preferably bootable from a flash drive, that will actually read and write test the entire surface of the drive and make sure there are no bad sectors. I know about the SMART self test, but that isn't the same as a full read/write/verify test, is it?
Also, I'm not sure how to feel about a few of the drives. One has over 5.5 years of power on time, but 0 reallocated sectors or other indicators of pre-failure. Wendel said about these drives "you can set your watch by it, these drives are designed to last 5 years, after that you're on borrowed time", so should I trust this one? And another has 1.5 years on time, and 3 reallocated sectors, but does not increase with repeated self tests. From what I understand this is normal and okay, but please confirm or deny that for me.
I have used DBAN for this is the past, it's made for secure erasing disks but it has the option to verify the data it writes. So you can do a single pass with either zeros (faster) or random data and it will write it and verify each block. It will probably tell you if there are any write errors but it would be worth comparing the SMART data before and after.
Hmm, that sounds like it should work for what I need. Compare which part of the smart data? Just the reallocated sector count, or is there something else that might change?
Yeah, there are a few you want to watch out for, I don't remember them off the top of my head but if you see significant changes in those then that's a pretty good indication that the disk might not last long.
Man I love spinrite, but last I checked it wouldnt work with any 2TB drive. I dont remember why but it fails to do the whole disk. Could have been fixed since I last tried though.
Yupp, spinrite looks like what I was looking for, but man that price isn't gonna happen right now. I'm running DBAN, which seems like it'll do what I need for now.