February 23, 20242 yr I recently moved. In the process a bunch of my "old" hardware got mixed up with my "new" hardware.... I now find myself with a box of hard drives (More then 30). I would like to setup some kind of test where I can get a simple "Pass" or "Fail" as to if I should trust each drive with data. Short of just looking at a SMART report is there something else I can do to test each drive? I have an old dell server I can install a few drives in at a time. It actually has server blades, each with 3x 3.5 drive bays. I was going to boot up unraid on each, and systematically try to run a preclear on each disk. If that works then drive Passes If it doesn't then drive fails. But doing so I'd need to go buy 4 more Unraid licenses just to test this bunch of drives which seems a bit of a waste. I suspect I could find the code for the preclear script some place and run it from a linux install of my choice but this feels like one of those problems someone else must have already solved and I'd be starting to reinvent the wheel. Am I already on the best path here or is there something I just don't know of yet?
February 23, 20242 yr Community Expert You should be able to do an extended SMART self-test from any OS
February 23, 20242 yr Community Expert I also believe that HD manufacturers still provide a utility disk for their drives and this will usually contain a program to perform read-write tests to every byte on the entire disk. Look on their websites for this. I believe that we are down to two manufacturers as a result of mergers and acquisitions now and I would think that their utilities would work on their acquisitions. The long smart test will do the read portion but the write is not performed.
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