What I'm about to tell you will potentially save you from future catastrophic failures including loss of data. Nothing beats having multiple good backup copies.; however, the following information will instruct you on how to test your new drive to make sure it's free from defects.
Imagine, you have a spinning disk rotating thousands of times per minute separated by its recording/reading head by less thickness of a human hair. Just one wrong thing and .. "click..click..click".
You don't want that.
Generally speaking a bad hard drive will make itself known sooner vs later when it's tested fully. Not always. What YOU can do is put the hard drive through its paces to really give it a good solid work out and make sure every space designated by the drive as available/writeable space, is in fact GOOD. Its magnetic/electrical properties strong.
This test is a LONG test. What it does is write all 01010101s,10101010s,11111111s,and 00000000s, binary, to the disk.--filling it. It does this in 4 passes (i.e. writes the disk fully) 4 times. After each write it will read what was just written beginning to end to ensure all bits were written exactly right.
If they wern't, the drive's detection mechanism for errors (SMART) will notice (i.e. a bit was not written to a sector correctly) and flag the SMART COUNTER. For example, uncorrectable or reallocated sector count would show a non-0 value.
During operation, if the drive encounters a fault with a sector it will swap that sector with another known good sector the drive has in reserve and will log it via SMART.
A PERFECTLY WORKING HARD DRIVE WILL SHOW '0' for 'Reallocated Sector Count','Reported Uncorrectable Errors','Current Pending Sector Count','Uncorrectable Sector Count'.IF ANY OF THESE VALUES SHOWS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A 0 (zero), THEN YOU HAVE A FAILING HDD AND SHOULD REPLACE IT ASAP. DO NOT TRUST YOUR DATA ON IT.
This command will erase everything on the disk if there is data already on there when you run this test. For this 2TB it would have taken about 30 hours, but I stopped it at the start of the final pass since I was confident--4 passes are better but do at least 2. But I am confident the data will be safe because it worked out the drive hard and pictures above show good numbers.
Boot up your computer using a linux distribution boot usb/cd. Debian Ubuntu, any one will do--it doesn't matter.
In a terminal type: sudo fdisk -l
*Identiy which /dev is your HDD you wish to test. Also note if it says 512 or 4096 where it says "Sector size (logical/physical)". For example, if it's /dev/sde and says 4096 Sector Size (such as this 2tb drive) then type the following command:
sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 -c 131072 /dev/sde
This will 0101,1010,1111,and 0000 write and read/verify the drive back-to-back in 4 passes. On my slow computer this took around 24-30 hours to complete or 2tb.
The ' -b ' option is the Block Size. This should match the drive. 512 or 4096. The '-c' option tells badblocks how many blocks to test at time. Changing this number will alter the speed and will either make the process go along faster or slower (dependant on Drive Interface, Ram/Cpu speed, etc.). Instead of '-c 131072' ,try '-c 65536 if it seems the test is taking too long to increment the %'s.
In fact try it with '-c 65536' option. Let it run or 30 sec then CTRL-C to cancel it. Then run the command again but with '-c 131072' instead. Run it for 30 sec then CTRL-C to cancel. Compare the 2 and whichever command that had the higher % when you CTRL-C'd would be the number you would choose since that one ran a little bit faster. Google or man page 'badblocks' for more information.
Whenever you buy a new hard drive get into the mindset/habit that you will NOT use them for awhile because you have to test them out first. Trust me on this and it's totally worth it. I'd like to think I avoid catastrophic failures because I did this test and it would have presented itself (or at least more likelihood) then vs months/years down the road. That's not a given--any drive can fail anytime or any reason but this is just an additional layer. Like a "shakedown cruise' if you will.
Regarding this drive: Western Digital 2TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache,, I can say that I am pleased it tested clean and I look forward to using this drive.And I'm confident it will keep my data intact.
You are welcome!
| Standing screen display size | 3.5 Inches |
|---|---|
| RAM | 1 GB |
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Hybrid Drive |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
| National Stock Number | 7025-01-619-0850 |
