Dale writes:
> I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way. Should be here Wednesday. I
> have seen some reviews where it would not work right. I think some of
> it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large.
> Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up
> to the task before putting my data on it. It's going to be so much
> data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point. Come on, 2
> to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs. Really? lol Maybe a external drive later on but
> for now, well.
>
> I have heard of bonnie and friends. I also think dd could do some
> testing too. Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if
> it holds up? Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too. I have
> never used it before. Maybe someone has some test that is really
> brutal.
smartctl -t long /dev/sdb will make the drive start a selftest. This
will take a while, and even more if the drive is being used otherwise, as
this test should not impact its performance. Use smartctl -l selftest to
view the results. As long as there is no number in the
'LBA_of_first_error' column, it should be okay.
That is a reading test only, badblocks -sw /dev/sdb will make it perform
a write-mode test. It uses four different patterns, I would be okay with
only one test, so I'd either stop it when it is done writing and
comparing the first pattern, or supply a test pattern with option -t.
Wonko
