Initial Testing of New Hard Drives in Linux

• Most of the SMART monitoring tools will sound alerts themselves if it detects something going wrong, I think a couple to watch out for are "Current Pending Sectors" and maybe "Reallocated Sector Count", but a few errors are apparently common.

  Run all the SMART self-tests too, offline, short, long, and the conveyance test should be particularly applicable, it's "intended to identify damage incurred during transporting of the device."

  See smartctl's man page for more info, or Ubuntu's Community Help Wiki on Smartmontools

• When formatting the drive, have it run the write testing of badblocks (or run it yourself before formatting, apparently not all mkfs's support it), it writes 0's, 1's, 01's and 10's and should be a good workout, check the SMART data afterwards too for any drastically increased numbers.

  If it's a flash memory device or an SSD you might want to keep in mind they have a limited lifetime of writes, but decent SSD's [I've read in a test] where they should handle an insane amount of writes before failing, like constant writes for months, far more than normal usage does, so don't worry.]

• Check the drive's spindown timeout, there were some drives in the past that would spindown every 2 or 3 minutes, really wearing out the drives in record time. In linux it's usually the responsibility of other programs to time & spindown drives, but watch out for the drive itself.

• If you can monitor the temperature of the drive, do so. hddtemp should work. One drive being significantly hotter than the others would be a red flag about the drive or just it's cooling.

And if the manufacturer has a specific testing/monitoring program, give it a try. They should have more insight into the drive's specifics.