Hard drive fail - How to regain confidence on the drive or make some use of it
After a hard drive fail (lots of corrupted sectors) I reformat it, but the drive give me no confidence to use it in production.
- Is there a tool to stress test so I know I can use it?
- In which ways would you use the drive so if it fails again you don't end up with data loss?
Solution 1:
The problem is that if a drive has failed you once, you can't trust it. In almost every case, the value of the data you are proposing to store, plus the potential costs of loss or recovery if that data gets lost, exceeds the cost of a new drive.
If the data you are proposing to store has any value to you at all, don't use the drive. Buy a replacement.
I might consider using it in a RAID-1 if I was desperate, and even then probably only for 100% scratch (ie local working storage on a compute node).
The alternative is to convince yourself you have a controller issue, and that's why the disk got corrupted. If you buy another disk and almost immediately have the same problems, then that's possible, and you can probably use the first disk in another computer.
Solution 2:
I like to run SpinRite on semi-defunct drives just to see if they're worth anything. It takes quite a while, but it's worth it in the long run.
See here: http://www.grc.com/intro.htm