Utility to burn in new hard drive?

In article , Joe S writes

"badblocks -swv /dev/hdX" using any Linux distribution, where X = a for prim master, b for prim slave, c for sec master, d for sec slave.

badblocks is on Tomsrtbt, a Linux distro on one floppy.

This will give the disk a good workout - it writes 0xaa, 0x55, 0xff,

0x00 to the entire disk, twiddling each and every bit, and reports any bad blocks found.

In article , Osiris writes

All of them. Google SMART.

How about Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT), from

? It works with any brand of drive but will write only to Hitachi/IBM drives.

Seagate's SeaTools will also run on any brand of drive but will do SMART diagnostics only on Seagates.

While that seems right initially, seldom do I hear of a drive arriving DOA or dying immediately (within an hour), usually it's within the first 9 months to a year if the failure is premature.

I thought one of the differences between a Maxtor DiamondMax and a MaXLine was that the MaXLine had been soak tested for longer?

In that case, testing a new drive mightbe worthwhile?

I think the information is not whether the drive works but if it will be an early failure. The failure curve is a bathtub shape.

Bart's Disktool,

Platform: Dos (and Windows9x) This is a generic harddisk testing tool. It works on ALL disks that are controlled by the BIOS, ATAPI/SCSI/RAID. It accesses the drive by INT13 and INT13 extensions. You can customize how the tests are run, in what order, how many loops...

Clueless. They are just a bit harder to find.

Just as low as it always was.

Like you are old enough to know.

If they did WD would not set Writecheck on for their drives early life to catch bad sectors on writes.

A timespan that you may want to speed up instead of waiting out.

Hence the burn-in test.

And often its due to mistreatment, such as overheating, unclean power or mechanical shock.

Arno

Indeed. But the left side got pretty steep in the last decade or so. Before it made sense to do some accelerated ageing ("burn in") to get to the level part. Today it does not really for HDDs or semiconductors.

Arno

Where did you get that from? At least the drive manual and data-sheet did not say so in any obvious places. or I overlooked that.

Arno

That does sound like a fine test for a new drive, but it bears mention that's a destructive test - it will erase the drives.

You can use -snv instead of -swv for a nondestructive test, though I wonder if the nondestructive test is as thorough.

If you mean 'test' it you can use the manufacturer's diagnostics.

But unless you're planning to pop it in an oven, or in some other way elevate the temperature, you're not doing a "burn in."

As far as I understand, non-destructive mode does exactly the same as destructive mode, but afterwards reconstructs the original sector. Don't let the power fail while you run it!

Arno

Well don't hold back, give us some solid examples viable today.

Even lower, manufacturing/QC is evolving over time like everything else does.

Is there a universal utility that can toggle this writecheck on multiple drive brands? I know Maxtors did it too and had a utility to toggle it back on, but I'd never tried it on another brand of drive and don't even remember what it was called.

hard drives are 'used up' by their 'use' - more use = less life. Burning in a HD is much like using it up.

Jaxx wrote

Nope, no one does that anymore.

It makes more sense to increase the backup frequency for the first couple of months or so.