HDD how to do a rigorous test in linux?

medoomi · Jun 20, 2016

I'm wondering if someone can direct me, I'm looking for linux software that will do a byte-by-byte analysis of a HDD for early error detection. In the past, I've not found SMART to give a perfect analysis. I've preferred doing a byte-by-byte HDD clone (eg. R-studio does a great job of isolating problem areas.)

Is there any software in linux that will test the HDD and give any better analysis of the HDD than typical SMART reports?

Thanks so much!

COLGeek · Jun 20, 2016

Try Smartmontools. See here for more info:

https://www.maketecheasier.com/monitor-hard-disk-health-linux/

medoomi · Jun 20, 2016

Any suggestions that don't rely on SMART?

COLGeek · Jun 21, 2016

Smartmontool does a detailed level of analysis that should be sufficient for all but the most advanced users.

I'll look around some more later today.

Good luck.

medoomi · Jun 21, 2016

COLGeek :

Thx! It's for a NAS server doing rsync backups... I'm looking for the most detailed analysis I can find...

COLGeek · Jun 21, 2016

What version of Linux are you running?

medoomi · Jun 21, 2016

Ubuntu

COLGeek · Jun 21, 2016

After some research, the best tool I can find is the one recommended earlier. I am going to move this thread to the Open Source section. Maybe one of the Linux gurus that frequent that section of the forum can be of assistance.

skittle · Jun 21, 2016

Use badblocks

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/badblocks

If you are really worried about bad sectors corrupting your data you should consider RAID and maybe btrfs/zfs. Both offer built in RAID and metadata check summing, copy-on-write and many more useful features.

medoomi · Jun 25, 2016

skittle :

Hi Skittle, thanks so very much for the suggestion--it's definitely what I was looking for...

An extra question you might be able to help me with is about RAID configurations. I'm presently planning on doing software raid. My assumption is that this would give better access to the component drives for analysis (depending on hardware RAID, I'm guessing might make individual HDD analysis problematic). Does this make sense? Or am I not thinking of something?

skittle · Jun 25, 2016

Not sure about that but software raid much more portable, ie you can plug into a different machine and it will work no problem. Not true with hardware raid.

Also you can choose BTRFS, Mdadm, ZFS...

medoomi · Jun 25, 2016

skittle :

Thanks again so much...

Out of interest, does anyone know what kind of hit software raid has on a CPU? I'm guessing it's small & given that it will be for a NAS, I doubt it would require much--any guesses though?

skittle · Jun 26, 2016

Not sure I searched quite a while to no avail. Would be inserting to see proper benchmark done with various workload and RAID configuration. The linux tool IoZone is a good tool.

That said I would imagine for modern cpu RAID is not much of a challenge

medoomi · Jun 26, 2016

thanks so much!

medoomi · Feb 19, 2017

In terms of figuring how much of a hardware hit software RAID gives a system vs. hardware RAID, I found this article useful. It doesn't directly answer the question, but gives some useful info on what needs to be considered to have software RAID running efficiently:
www.serverfault.com/a/685328

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