What software to test SATA drives before adding to RAID 5 Array
I'll be creating a 6drive RAID 5 array for use with Openfiler. What I'd like to do is test the drives thoroughly before building the array and putting them into production. What free software is best suited for this, and does any software allow you to test multiple drives at once?
I'll be testing 2tb Hitachi 5K3000 5400 rpm drives.
You didn't say which operating system you're on...
On Windows, my workflow for burn-in testing harddisks now tends to be:
- Attach the drive as a non-system drive (i.e. attach it as a secondary drive to an existing Windows installation).
- Run Crystal Disk Info or another S.M.A.R.T tool on the drive, record most important stats on paper.
- Format the drive 2-3 times via Truecrypt as a full-disk encrypted volume. This will ensure that the drive gets completely overwritten with random (encrypted) data. Doing this from within Windows sidesteps all issues about some DOS boot disk not seeing large drives, some BIOS'es having problems with large drives, etc.
- Run the S.M.A.R.T tool again, and compare values, especially the number of re-mapped (bad) blocks. If this is significant, don't use the drive.
For Linux, @Hubert Kario's badblocks suggestion seems a good one.
You can also use the manufacturer's "drive fitness test" or similar. Most manufacturers have this kind of tool, and it generally contains a long & data-destructive drive test which zero-fills the drive.
On the good side, the manufacturers own tool might provide an error code, which is accepted as grounds for warranty replacement. On the bad side, I just find Truecrypt faster and easier to deal with, and at least as thorough.
The Ultimate Boot CD has a collection of reasonably up to date versions of these manufacturer-specific tools, see the section "Hard Disk Diagnosis".
Nota bene: This kind of burn-in test should never be performed on SSD's. It does no good for SSD's, but causes a fair amount of wear to them.
You could try Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test tool, http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/. Alternatively, you could make a few read/write passes with badblocks.
I don't know if you can use multiple D.F.T. at a time, but you can run multiple instances of badblocks.
Since the drives are large, a badblocks pass or two is going to take some time. Look at tweaking the block size and number of blocks setting (-b and -c, respectively) to get better performance.
Here is a sample command line:
badblocks -v -n -b 4096 -p 2 -c 8192 <device>
- v - verbose output
- n - non destructive read/write mode
- b - size of blocks in bytes, default is 1024
- p - number of passes
- c - number of blocks to test at once