Fastest way to check for bad sectors in HDD?

Question

I have a bunch of disks, probably 50 or more laying there, I know some of them are broken and some should still work fine, I need a way to check them without wasting days.

Do you know any tools besides badblocks, that can do it without taking too much time?

Solution 1

You have to check some SMART utilities.

You can use "Disk Utility" (aka palimpsest or gnome-disks depending on the Ubuntu release) for this.

In command line I suggest you install the smartmontools package (sudo apt install smartmontools) and play around with smartctl.

Example:

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda

Solution 2

If your drives have SMART, I would go about this by installing "gsmartcontrol" and doing a short test on all drives. Then throw away the ones that do not even pass the short test or display errors/warnings and perform a long test on the remaining drives.

To truly find out if a drive is damaged or not, I guess you will need to check every sector of it and that's what the long test does.

But I am no expert, maybe there is a better way?

Solution 3

For those who find this question looking for a solution to the badblocks error Value too large for defined data type (as you might get trying to scan a 6TB drive): try setting larger block size:

badblocks -b 4096 /dev/sde

Comments

[Mitch]

Take a look at fsck.

[Computer's Guy]

isn't that for linux file systems?

[Mitch]

It is. What file system(s) are you using?

[Computer's Guy]

The hard drives may have different file systems, i need to check the hardware for bad sectors regardless of their OS.

[Computer's Guy]

thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SMART_tests_with_smartctl#Short_Tes‌​t I found more info here.