What tools do I have available to test a hard drive's health?

Question

I've got an older hard drive that I have recently re-formatted to ext4 and would like to use it as a spare of a spare backup.

Before I put any data on it, I was wondering what tools, or applications, that I can use to test its health and reliability.

I have run a fsck against it and smartctl tools indicates that the drive is healthy.

Are there any other utilities that I could run against this drive to give it a basic health pass? This is not mission critical. I am just looking for some additional day-to-day utilities to ease my mind. Thanks.

Solution 1

You can use "Disk Utility"

1. Open the Disks application from the Dash.

2. Select the disk you want to check from the Storage Devices list. Information and status of the disk will appear under Drive.

3. SMART Status should say "Disk is healthy".

4. Click the SMART Data button to view more drive information, or to run a self-test.

and if you want to use command line then you can run following command :

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda

Solution 2

S.M.A.R.T data is the way to go - it is the black box of your hard drive. What matters the most is the "Attributes" tab that contains detailed SMART data. The overall "passed" might sometimes be deceiving. Currently the attributes tab is red and that means some attribute is red (some attribute has grown beyond threshold). You should check out what it is.

There are lots of attributes and you can read about them here. But in short if you see "Current Pending Sector Count" you should be in cold sweat and if it is "Uncorrectable Sector Count" or "Offline Uncorrectable" or "Off-Line Scan Uncorrectable Sector Count" it is time for heartbreak. In the first case the problem might go away and in the second case it will not (but it will get worse for sure). In both cases it is time to back up everything and prepare for possible hard drive failure.

Solution 3

badblocks with its -w flag will give your drive fairly exhaustive testing (but will destroy the contents, so don't use it on a drive that has data you want to keep).

Comments

[Kevin Bowen]

@Tanel Mae Not a bad point. There, specifically, I do have pre-failure issue. I'm still looking for other tools to use against the drive. Thanks.

[Kevin Bowen]

Thank you. Just prior to posting, I started a run with badblocks: sudo badblocks -n -v /dev/sdg2 There is no data on the drive, so I am not worried about overly intrusive testing.

[earthmeLon]

Yes, you definitely want to do this, or just write random data to the entire drive to give the drive a chance to mark sectors as bad before you try to write important data to them.