I believe I had some bad luck with some refurbished drives and now I'm looking for the most efficient steps to stress test my NAS to ensure that my drive cages, sata cables, sata ports, and PCI Sata breakout cards are all reliable on my long-running 20 drive NAS.

 

PLAN: Put old 8TB drives into each of the 20 drive slots. Run a SMART test. Run a preclear. If the SMART and preclear run without issue -- even if the drive fails due to old age -- then I would think I've confirmed that the hardware/cabling is solid.

 

QUESTION: Do I need to run a full preclear to ensure there are no hardware/cable issues or can I simply run the preclear pre-clear and a bit of zeroing to essentially do some read/write stress testing?

 

CONTEXT: My drive has (7) 20TB Exos drives. I've never had an issue with one. The last two 20TB Exos drives I put into my NAS had major issues. They threw endless errors when starting preclearing and SMART tests wouldn't start.

After speaking with the reputable refurbished drive vendor, they do not believe this is a power-disable problem or an issue with my NAS. They believe they had a bad batch and are sending me a new drive to test, but now I'm paranoid since the drives failed to work in so many slots on my NAS

3 hours ago, newoski said:

The last two 20TB Exos drives I put into my NAS had major issues. They threw endless errors when starting preclearing and SMART tests wouldn't start.

After speaking with the reputable refurbished drive vendor, they do not believe this is a power-disable problem or an issue with my NAS.

Purchasing refurnished drives carries a risk associated with them.  You can never know anything about their past history.  Yes, you can purchase them from a reputable reseller but he has to acquire them from another party.  You should only buy from a vendor who will provide you with a no-question-asked replacement warranty for a certain period of time. (I would suggest a minimum of thirty days!)    As soon as they arrive, I would start two cycles of the preclear operation to put them under stress.  Any drive with a failure return immediately.  You can run a SMART test on them but I don't believe that ever does a write to a drive which the preclear procedure does do. 

First, thanks for the reply. I hear you. I bought from a reputable vendor -- ServerPartDeals. They've been great. The issue isn't should I or shouldn't I run preclear on new drives. I agree, I should and I do. 

 

My question is, how can I stress test my server to ensure that all of my other connections between the MOBO to each hard drive are solid? Preclear seems like the best way -- as it will read/write a TON of data -- it just isn't quick and I'm just trying to rebuild my confidence in my NAS hardware, after what I believe to be a fluke DISC issue

+1 to ServerPartsDeals.  Every one of the spinners in my siggy came from them.  Zero issues with any of the drives.

 

There is no foolproof test.  Write/read 100TB, and have it die 2TB later.  I generally run a preclear on the drives when I receive them, as usually at least one drive ends up in a drawer of the server desk as a cold spare.  I then feel better, more confident that it isn't DOA or has issues.

6 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:

+1 to ServerPartsDeals.  Every one of the spinners in my siggy came from them.  Zero issues with any of the drives.

 

There is no foolproof test.  Write/read 100TB, and have it die 2TB later.  I generally run a preclear on the drives when I receive them, as usually at least one drive ends up in a drawer of the server desk as a cold spare.  I then feel better, more confident that it isn't DOA or has issues.

My question is about stress testing the connections between the MOBO and the HDD... sata ports, sata cables, drive cage connections, PCI-SATA breakouts

They're all connected (no pun intended).  It is all a serial path - from CPU, through all of those devices, to the HDD. 

If it all works?  Great.  If it doesn't?  The there's some troubleshooting to do.

1 minute ago, ConnerVT said:

They're all connected (no pun intended).  It is all a serial path - from CPU, through all of those devices, to the HDD. 

If it all works?  Great.  If it doesn't?  The there's some troubleshooting to do.

 

Right, I'm with you. So what's the fastest way to test reads/writes to each bay? Most are unused, so they would be unassigned devices. How can I test read/writes to them, easily? 

Windows. Hardware info, cpuz, gpuz ... there's some other software for disk and motherboards.... prime 95 etc...

For disks I generally use:

https://hddscan.com/

As I tend to go Seagate refrib as they are cheap enterprise drives... You want to make sure your getting CMR and not SMR drives... (or is that vise vera... I always get them backwards).... As one typ is slower reads then normal...

 

alot of the segate exo drives were manufactured but never sold age of disk hit smart age errors and became apart of the refirb market... So while new sealed manufactured, there motherboard port connection boards had refurbished due to age and there original manufacturing date...

Outside of 3rd party buy warranty check HD manufacture Warranties and there tool sets...

Segate for example, usually the HD manufactures have additional test applications they use to check warranty as well

https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

 

otherwise we start getting into CSC class forenics and use linux tools to check disks...

in unraid id use dd linux type commands to check disk:

Example I remember a plugin / script at one time but i think thats dead now...

 

 

You can run preclear on multiple drives at the same time, if you have the resources available in your server.

 

It takes ~25 hours to read every location in my 18TB drives.  This is a function of the access time of your drive and system.  There is no shortcut that will make this happen any faster.

2 hours ago, newoski said:

My question is about stress testing the connections between the MOBO and the HDD... sata ports, sata cables, drive cage connections, PCI-SATA breakouts

 

Yeah that's not something you can really "Stress test." these things kinda just work until they don't.