Burn-in Testing for Spinning Disks - Data Recovery with Open-Source Tools (part 4)

This is part 4 of a multi-part series.  See part 1 for the beginning of the series.

Note that this was written long before solid state drives were common (or possibly before they existed), so when I say "drive", I mean traditional spinning hard drives.  Burn-in testing like this on SSDs makes a lot less sense and will likely only reduce their useful lifespan.

Burn-in testing

A good way to do a burn-in test on a new drive is to use a combination of SMART self-tests and the badblocks utility.  An example of how to do this can be found at https://github.com/silug/drivetest.

This script does the following:

1. Enables SMART on the drive
2. Checks for existing SMART health problems
3. Runs a SMART conveyance or short test if the drive advertises that capability
4. Uses badblocks to do a non-destructive read/write test of the whole drive
5. Checks for resulting SMART errors
6. Runs an extended SMART test

Depending on the size of the drive, this can take many hours, but the result will be a drive that should be past any early failures.

To be continued in part 5.