Testing LARGE hard drives before use...

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Hey everyone, LONG TIME no post....

I have treated myself to a few drives for a storage server I am (hoping I will be able) to build. For large drives, do you guys do any sort of testing with them before throwing data on there in case there are issues? Finding an issue on a 4TB drive halfway through migrating data would take a while....

Here is the BEGINNING of my researching a server build... from 2 years ago... Man time flies when you have a wife and kids and NOT MUCH free time. lol.

http://www.techist.com/forums/f76/has-anyone-built-rackmount-server-thoughts-261412/

I have been using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software to view the SMART data, and run extended tests on each of the drives. I save the SMART data as screen shots for each drive in the format <model> - <Serial number> so that if one has issues I know what files to look at. I have 2 of the 4 TB drives done, and 3 to go, and I need to scan my 2 TB drives too.

Is there anything else I should scan them with? Also, how often should I check the SMART info for the drives to see if there is an issue coming down the pike?

The PLAN is to have them in a RAID 5 array with one of them being a hot spare.

 

[PP Mguire]

There's really no actual way to know if a drive is going to fail because sometimes SMART could give you fair warning and other times it can just crap out on you without even giving any signs.