{"id":632,"date":"2026-01-30T19:03:43","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T03:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/?p=632"},"modified":"2026-01-30T19:03:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T03:03:43","slug":"testing-a-new-hard-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/blog\/2026\/01\/30\/testing-a-new-hard-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing A New Hard Drive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In my setup, I have tolerance for a single drive failing. Because of this, I have a cold spare drive in case of drive failures. Hard drives generally have very good Mean Time Between Failures &#8211; however, there&#8217;s the problem of infant mortality or drives that just fail very early in their life. For a drive that you purchase, maybe even years before use, this would be a very bad outcome both financially and also from a disaster recovery standpoint. I&#8217;m sharing my testing process for the backup drive that I use to screen for shipping damage and early defects for the cold spare drive:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Use an external USB dock (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0C2HM7KCX?th=1\">this one from Orico is my current rig<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Run the conveyance test &#8211; this makes sure the drive did not suffer any physical damage during transport. You do this using <code>sudo smartctl -t conveyance \/dev\/sdX<\/code>. Typically takes a few minutes (&lt; 5 minutes normally).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Run the short test &#8211; this runs a quick test to verify basic functionality of the drive works. You do this using <code>sudo smartctl -t short \/dev\/sdX<\/code>. Typically takes a few minutes (&lt; 5 minutes normally). This also validates basic functioning of the drive in a few minutes instead of waiting for several hours with the long test.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Run the long test &#8211; this checks all of the drive for bad sectors. You run this using <code>sudo smartctl -t long \/dev\/sdX<\/code>. Typically takes several hours (typical time on a 8 TB NAS drive is on the order of 12 hours). One issue with running this test with an external USB dock is that because the test is internal to the drive (no data or commands cross the SATA interface), typical docks would put the drive to sleep\/cut power to it causing the test to stall. You can avoid that by running <code>sudo watch -n 60 \"smartctl -a \/dev\/sdX | grep 'remaining'\"<\/code> to both keep the drive powered and also provide you with progress indication of the long running test.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>You can check the result of the self-test by running <code>sudo smartctl -l selftest \/dev\/sdX<\/code> after the test finishes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">None of this guarantees the lifetime of the disk. If a drive passes these tests, it is not Dead On Arrival and it is less likely to fail within the first few days of use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my setup, I have tolerance for a single drive failing. Because of this, I have a cold spare drive in case of drive failures. Hard drives generally have very good Mean Time Between Failures &#8211; however, there&#8217;s the problem of infant mortality or drives that just fail very early in their life. For a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":633,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}