A Guide to Hard Drive Testing Page 1 of 49 A Guide to Hard Drive Testing by Robert Spotswood Version 1.9.9.2 July 29, 2015 A Guide to Hard Drive Testing Page 2 of 49 A Guide to Hard Drive Testing Version 1.9.9.2 © 2014-2015 by Robert Spotswood I can be reached at [email protected] and I also [mostly] lurk on the smartmontools mailing list. Questions about smartmontools are better directed there than to me directly. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Disclaimer: This work is provided as is. Despite my best efforts to make this guide comprehensive and correct, I can not guarantee there are no mistakes. Therefore, I disavow any potential liability for the contents of this document. Use of the concepts, examples, and/or other content of this document is entirely at your own risk, however small that may be. The opinions in this document are my own. A Guide to Hard Drive Testing Page 3 of 49 There is no test that can tell you a hard drive is good, only tests that can tell you it is bad. A Guide to Hard Drive Testing Page 4 of 49 Table of Contents A Guide to Hard Drive Testing..................................................................................................................1 Introduction................................................................................................................................................6 S.M.A.R.T.............................................................................................................................................6 Sectors...................................................................................................................................................6 Automatic Acoustic Management.........................................................................................................7 Reading, Writing, and Error Types........................................................................................................7 Hard Errors.......................................................................................................................................7 Soft Errors.........................................................................................................................................7 Medium Errors..................................................................................................................................8 Accessing SMART Data with smartmontools...........................................................................................9 Testing with smartmontools.....................................................................................................................10 Determining Disk Drives................................................................................................................10 Perform Tests..................................................................................................................................11 Looking at the SMART data...........................................................................................................12 Identity............................................................................................................................................12 Read Smart Data Section................................................................................................................13 Attributes..................................................................................................................................................13 Error Log........................................................................................................................................15 Self Test Logs.................................................................................................................................15 Other Testing Tools..................................................................................................................................16 hdparm............................................................................................................................................16 badblocks........................................................................................................................................18 Which is better: badblocks or the SMART tests?...........................................................................20 The 40% Drives.......................................................................................................................................21 Appendix A: Crash Course in Linux........................................................................................................22 Case-sensitive.................................................................................................................................22 Terminals........................................................................................................................................22 Root................................................................................................................................................22 History and Searches......................................................................................................................23 Switches..........................................................................................................................................23 Less.................................................................................................................................................23 Appendix B: Updating smartmontools DB..............................................................................................24 Appendix C: Testing with GSmartControl...............................................................................................25 Main Page.......................................................................................................................................25 Identity............................................................................................................................................25 Attributes........................................................................................................................................26 Capabilities.....................................................................................................................................27 Error Log........................................................................................................................................27 Self Test Logs.................................................................................................................................28 Perform Tests..................................................................................................................................28 Appendix D: Testing Flowchart...............................................................................................................30 Appendix E: Advanced Format Drives....................................................................................................36 Background.........................................................................................................................................36 Advantages of AF drives.....................................................................................................................37 Efficiency........................................................................................................................................37 A Guide to Hard Drive Testing Page 5 of 49 Reliability.......................................................................................................................................37 Performance....................................................................................................................................38 Bigger MBR...................................................................................................................................38 Disadvantages of AF drives.................................................................................................................38 Older Software................................................................................................................................38 Alignment Issues Background........................................................................................................38 Checking For Mis-alignment..........................................................................................................39 When to Worry About Alignment...................................................................................................41 Aligning a Mis-Aligned Drive........................................................................................................41 Odds and Ends................................................................................................................................42 Appendix F: Solid-State Drives...............................................................................................................43 Background.........................................................................................................................................43 NAND Types.......................................................................................................................................43