I had to send a Barracuda drive back recently.
“It’s fine” said Seagate’s SMART analysis tools.
“Clunk clunk clunk clonk” said the HDD.
I know which of those results I trusted more.
How does one test for this?
There are several programs that can check for disk info (S.M.A.R.T), so I’ll lay out some options for you
CrystalDiskInfo is free to use on Windows
For MacOS (where realistically you’d be doing this for an external drive as I believe they don’t show you much or anything at all on modern internal drives) you can get a free trial of DriveDX. There are probably other programs you can use for free, but if you only need to do it once, just get that because it does a really good job of letting you know what’s up. Just visualizes things in an easily newbie-understandable way.
There are programs that can check such things as runtime, wear (…).
PSA to always run a full length SMART check for any drives you buy, even from OEM. The short test and log are not enough, I have bought faulty drives that someone had reset the logs and power on hours.
All passed short SMART test, but failed long SMART test after only a few minutes. Found just one drive that the skrub forgot to wipe and the log showed 6 continuous years of power on usage.
Even from OEM, you will at least know if the hardware is DOA which you can then RMA.
Probably performs a good burn-in for them too.
Do people still do that? Used to be common practice to power on equipment and let it sit, either idle or full-tilt, for a couple days before even starting to configure it. Let the factory bugs scatter out.
I do; I use a four pass destructive run of badblocks on new drives before implementing them.
Landlord just got me a new washing machine. I’ve been burning it in since Sunday.
My parents bought a beach house (a bungalow on a postage stamp, before anyone gets an ideas that we’re some 1%ers) and it came with an old washer dryer. My old man put a single pair of jeans in the dryer and seemingly forgot about them. He says he did it for a timer. Leaves the house. Nobody there for a week. My mom comes in, dryer still running, jeans essentially translucent at this point. One of the things you can laugh at only because it wasn’t a tragedy.
I can tell your lieing, because your pants are on fire.
No no, that was the old washer setting pants on fire.
Never heard of that, interesting
Secondary PSA Seagate use some godawful numbering scheme on their SMART results, if you’re not aware of the fact you need a calculator understand the raw error count it will freak you the fuck out.
Accoirding to TFA these drives all passed SMART tests.
