I got my 10x HDDs delivered from ServerPartDeals, they’re Dell branded Exos drives, Seller Refurbished

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I know one of the first things I’m supposed to do is make sure they’re configured to run at 4K, not 512, so I’ll be checking that.

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I’ll also plug them all into a HDD dock and read the SMART data off them.

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Afterwards, I remember reading a guide (here I believe) about how to test all the drives. There was a command line tool to check the drive for errors.

Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I remember I had to run a plugin on the computer to make sure I could run multiple instances of it.

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Alternately, I intend to spin up a TrueNAS instance for this, does TrueNAS have any built in tool to fully check the drives before I create any pools?

  • acdcfanbill@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    when I get new hdds, i open a tmux instance with one pane per hdd, then i do:

    • smartctl -t short /dev/sdX
    • smartctl -t conveyance /dev/sdX
    • badblocks -b 4096 -ws /dev/sdX
    • smartctl -t long /dev/sdX

    And if it passes all those, then I put them into a zpool.

    edit: for bigger drives, you might need to increase the block size for badblocks, 65535 for example.

    • johandepohan@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Can you tell me why you go for 2^12 but then choose (2^16)-1 as an alternative? Wouldn’t that create alignment issues?