Just bought 5 used 8TB Ultrastar drives on ebay for only $35 each. Heck of a deal right? Checked smart info and everything looks good. Of course i know it would be a good idea to do a complete scan for bad sectors but I don’t know the best program for that. Ideally a free win10 program that i could test all 5 at once connected to one pc

  • HTWingNutB
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    1 year ago

    WD has the “WD Dashboard” utility that will allow you to run a LONG SMART test.

  • binaryriotB
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    1 year ago

    If out of other options just do a simply zero format (e.g. diskutil zeroDisk diskX on macOS), and a long SMART test afterwards (e.g. smartctl -t long diskX). That’s what I do with my new disks and it served me well so far. For large capacity disks it is like a heavy 2 day process (1 day formatting, 1 day testing), but it gives me a piece of mind afterwards.


    Extra Hint: During any SMART long test make sure to disable disk sleep in your OS for the time, else test will abort (e.g. caffeinate -m on macOS). Also avoid crappy external enclosures that put the disks to sleep by themselves (or you may want to run a script that regularly reads a block from the disk to keep it awake.)

    Here’s my macOS script to handle the job (I needed it recently because a temporary crappy USB enclosure). It reads a block every 2 minutes via raw I/O w/o caching involved (“/dev/rdisk”)

    #!/bin/bash
    # $Id: keepdiskawake 64 2023-10-29 01:55:56Z tokai $
    
    if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    	echo "keepdiskawake: required argument required (disk identifier, volume name, or volume path)." 1>&2
    	exit 1
    fi
    
    MY_DISKID=`diskutil info "${1}" | awk '/Device Identifier:/ {print $3}'`
    
    if [[ ! -z "${MY_DISKID-}" ]]; then
    	printf '\033[35mPoking disk \033[1m"%s"\033[22m with identifier \033[1m"%s"\033[22m…\033[0m\n' "${MY_DISKNAME}" "${MY_DISKID}"
    	MY_RDISKID="/dev/r${MY_DISKID}"
    	echo "CTRL-C to quit"
    	while true; do
    		echo -n .
    		dd if="${MY_RDISKID}" of="/dev/null" count=1 2>/dev/null
    		sleep 120
    	done
    else
    	echo "keepdiskawake: Couldn't determine disk identifier for \"${1}\"." 1>&2
    	exit 1
    fi