this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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What program do you use to check for bad sectors? (alien.top)
submitted 10 months ago by Altruistic_Cup_8436@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum
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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

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[–] binaryriot@alien.top 1 points 10 months 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