On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 09:58:58AM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> Cerem Cem ASLAN posted on Wed, 29 Aug 2018 09:58:21 +0300 as excerpted:
> 
> > Thinking again, this is totally acceptable. If the requirement was a
> > good health disk, then I think I must check the disk health by myself.
> > I may believe that the disk is in a good state, or make a quick test or
> > make some very detailed tests to be sure.
> 
> For testing you might try badblocks.  It's most useful on a device that 
> doesn't have a filesystem on it you're trying to save, so you can use the 
> -w write-test option.  See the manpage for details.
> 
> The -w option should force the device to remap bad blocks where it can as 
> well, and you can take your previous smartctl read and compare it to a 
> new one after the test.
> 
> Hint if testing multiple spinning-rust devices:  Try running multiple 
> tests at once.  While this might have been slower on old EIDE, at least 
> with spinning rust, on SATA and similar you should be able to test 
> multiple devices at once without them slowing down significantly, because 
> the bottleneck is the spinning rust, not the bus, controller or CPU.  I 
> used badblocks years ago to test my new disks before setting up mdraid on 
> them, and with full disk tests on spinning rust taking (at the time) 
> nearly a day a pass and four passes for the -w test, the multiple tests 
> at once trick saved me quite a bit of time!

   Hah. Only a day? It's up to 2 days now.

   The devices get bigger. The interfaces don't get faster at the same
rate. Back in the late '90s, it was only an hour or so to run a
badblocks pass on a big disk...

   Hugo.

-- 
Hugo Mills             | Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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