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