tankman1989
Active Member
- Reaction score
- 5
Over the past years I have become VERY skeptical of new hard drives. It seems that if they are not DOA, they are going to fail within the first 2-3 weeks of use if they are going to fail at all. What are your thoughts on this?
That being said, I would like to create a procedure where I can break-in these drives prior to selling one to a customer. I do not trust ANY of these off the shelf retail externals I see for under $100. I can't imagine anyone who has worked in the computer field for very long that wouldn't understand this, but explaining it to the customer is a different story.
I am either going to run a process of "burn in/testing" or offer external RAID1 backups.
The testing procedure would look something like this:
Here is what I think I may do on every drive I sell as an external backup:
1. Short and Extended factory scan
2. DD copy in Linux to fill disk with data (copy same size disk to new disk) Write testing
3. copy all data from new drive to work drive via DD (read testing)
4. Repeat 2&3 a number of times
5. Wipe partition table, create new partition & format
6. write random files via script
7. read (copy) random files via script
8. Wipe or zero drive with DoD 7 passes
I think I would be able to automate most of this and may be able to do multiple drives at one time. I have seen setups where you connect one cable to this "mini tower" that holds 4-20 drives (depending upon the $$ you want to spend) and it treat all the drives within the same. So if you copy one file to this tower, it writes to all the drives. This is similar to what Dell and HP use to clone their system hard drives. It is a MASSIVE RAID redundancy!!
This is obviously a time consuming process and wonder if it is worth while. I have seen external RAID1 setups and think that this may be the better price option.
For those questioning why I feel the need to test drives, here is what I went through in one week setting up a server.
Just last summer, I ordered 2 500Gb WD SATAII drives, the best ones they made and they both failed within a week. They were being run in a server with RAID 1. When one went down we said "good thing we have RAID on it", two days later, the other drive died.
We RMA'd the to NewEgg and they shipped out two replacements and upon arrival we ran a full diagnostic and the both had SMART failures. We switched to a new machine and ran the diag again. Same outcome.
Anyway, I think the two new drives they shipped, one was fine and is still running AFAIK, and the other was SMART DOA. This really dropped my faith in WD, but I think there must have been a bad lot or something to have 5 out of 6 drives be bad. I've always found WD to be pretty reliable, especially their RE (Raid Edition drives).
That being said, I would like to create a procedure where I can break-in these drives prior to selling one to a customer. I do not trust ANY of these off the shelf retail externals I see for under $100. I can't imagine anyone who has worked in the computer field for very long that wouldn't understand this, but explaining it to the customer is a different story.
I am either going to run a process of "burn in/testing" or offer external RAID1 backups.
The testing procedure would look something like this:
Here is what I think I may do on every drive I sell as an external backup:
1. Short and Extended factory scan
2. DD copy in Linux to fill disk with data (copy same size disk to new disk) Write testing
3. copy all data from new drive to work drive via DD (read testing)
4. Repeat 2&3 a number of times
5. Wipe partition table, create new partition & format
6. write random files via script
7. read (copy) random files via script
8. Wipe or zero drive with DoD 7 passes
I think I would be able to automate most of this and may be able to do multiple drives at one time. I have seen setups where you connect one cable to this "mini tower" that holds 4-20 drives (depending upon the $$ you want to spend) and it treat all the drives within the same. So if you copy one file to this tower, it writes to all the drives. This is similar to what Dell and HP use to clone their system hard drives. It is a MASSIVE RAID redundancy!!
This is obviously a time consuming process and wonder if it is worth while. I have seen external RAID1 setups and think that this may be the better price option.
For those questioning why I feel the need to test drives, here is what I went through in one week setting up a server.
Just last summer, I ordered 2 500Gb WD SATAII drives, the best ones they made and they both failed within a week. They were being run in a server with RAID 1. When one went down we said "good thing we have RAID on it", two days later, the other drive died.
We RMA'd the to NewEgg and they shipped out two replacements and upon arrival we ran a full diagnostic and the both had SMART failures. We switched to a new machine and ran the diag again. Same outcome.
Anyway, I think the two new drives they shipped, one was fine and is still running AFAIK, and the other was SMART DOA. This really dropped my faith in WD, but I think there must have been a bad lot or something to have 5 out of 6 drives be bad. I've always found WD to be pretty reliable, especially their RE (Raid Edition drives).
