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Are people still stress testing new HD's these days?

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Brando

Member
Joined
Jan 9, 2006
What are the cool kids using now? I just got a WD red 4tb 5200rpm on sale and want to rip 500 dvd movies to it but the thought of doing it twice is frightening. what do pros do to rule out early failure in 2017?
 
There isn't really stress testing for hard drives. Put two in raid 1 and move on.

i think i will but i may wait a bit before getting the second drive. i heard it's good to get different batches at different ages so they don't fail together in a stroke of bad luck from the same defect or something like that. this way i'll have warning and order another one as soon as the first one dies. at least i think that's how it works. never done raid before.

edit: btw if anyone ever wants to rip their old dvd collection to an hd easily i finally narrowed it down to "makemkv". great program that leaves the movie itself alone and in the same vob format but puts it in a nice single file container so you can just double click to watch instead of mounting it or whatever. ok i'm done.
 
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Yeah, my first priority is a separate drive for backups. Usually, I'll just do a monthly backup on a 2 TB external USB drive. I also usually have my data on a RAID 1 array. Also, HGST drives seem to have some of the best reliability out there. For example.
 
I don't think I have ever tested a HDD outside of speed and performance before...

You are looking into it too deeply IMO.. matching dates, stress testing a HDD....
 
Does anyone have recent experience with Steve Gibson's Spinrite? The way he describes it it thoroughly exercises a drive and causes the mechanicals to recalibrate. I don't know if that is something good to do as a of routine thing but supposedly it helps drives that are having difficulty.

With modern drive electronics the OS no longer remaps bad sectors. The drives does this internally and hides the operation from the OS except for reporting remapped sector count in SMART.

My experience with Spinrite dates to the time when it was beneficial to reorder the sectors (sector skew IIRC) on the platter to improve performance to the maximum the rest of the system could support.
 
not matching dates, just not getting 2 of the exact same thing at the same time. i still doubt they would die simultaneously but the idea was to add the second one a bit later so when the first one dies from old age the second one is still good. either way i think i'm too lazy for it. if my new drive survives having 500 movies ripped to it then it's probably tough enough.
 
Nice theory, but a drive can crap out at any time... :]
that's funny because i think it's actually dying already. new one is on the way.

EDIT: looks like it was a power cable adapter. oops. gonna test but seems ok after one rip that didn't work with the other cable.
 
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The last time I was in the game I used a piece of software, I think SpinRite, to quad bit-flip the entire surface of the HDDs. Then I would fill them with files and try accessing these various files. The idea was to help eliminate defective drives that would become problematic or die within a short period of time (as opposed to the usual 2-4 years run time, or more if lucky).

I figure if a drive gets through all that without problems coming up, it's more likely that it won't be a problem drive. Is it actually true? Not sure.
 
Heard of the bathtub failure curve? Things in general fail early on (uncaught manufacturing problems), or late on (age). Not so often in mid life. I use Unraid for my backup solution, and they recommend a full read, write, read cycle. The first read is to detect potentially unstable sectors. The write will allow the drive to remap them, the 2nd read will verify that.

Spinrite arguably is nothing more than brute force stress test, as there is no user accessible correlation between data on the disk and physical representation. I'd use disk manufacturer's utility to do the read-write-read. Personally I skip the first read. If you want to do multiple write passes of different data, look at dban.
 
What are the cool kids using now? I just got a WD red 4tb 5200rpm on sale and want to rip 500 dvd movies to it but the thought of doing it twice is frightening. what do pros do to rule out early failure in 2017?
Nothing? Ive never once stress tested a HDD or SSD. Seriously...just use it. :)

Ba, old tbread revived...already replied here, lolol!
 
I generally do a smart long test when I get a new drive for a quick check. But I have all of my stuff backed up multiple times and with redundancy

 
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