Breaking In a Hard Drive?

[Mr. B]

I'm planning on buying two Seagate ST31500341AS drives in the near future, their infamous 1.5tb randomly crashing boondoggle. I am aware of the risk but the price and capacity is just too tempting. As far as I know there is a high failure rate but generally speaking they work fine when purchased with the new firmware.

Since these drives fail shortly after purchase if they do fail, I was thinking maybe I could perform some sort of long-term stress test on the drive to attempt to induce failure faster than the first six weeks window in which it usually happens.

I am wondering if there is any defensible logic to this idea, and if so, what software tool(s) might I use to perform such a stress test.

 

[Syntax Error]

Are you planing to run these disks in a sort of RAID or simply standalone drives?

 

[Mr. B]

They will both be standalone for occasional access media storage. One will be internal and another will be off site in an enclosure for rsync backup. Eventually I may buy a third for a RAID1 in my PC.

 

[Syntax Error]

Well, other than just kicking the drive's ass through constant read/write cycles (try a full format or a full error scan in HD tune), I can't think of any way to "accelerate" the process other than to just keep backups of important data until you're satisfied that it's "reliable enough". Time is the ultimate test, and there's no knowing whether a hard drive just takes a crap one day...it just happens sometimes.

There are drives that fail within the first few days of purchase (likely due to rough shipping conditions or less likely, defects) and there are drives that last for years. There are those on this forum who are still using drives from 5-7 years back, knock on wood.

 

[Phimp]

I've also thought about this as a way to stress the hard drive for a week or so straight so I can trust it a little more with my data.

The only thing I can really think of is perform a couple full formats and error tests...
and make a dummy file that is slightly less than half of the drive's capacity (~650 GB for a 1.5 TB drive)... this file would be physically stored on the first half of the drive... then copy it to another file on the same drive... the second file would be on the back half of the drive.... delete the first file and then do the same thing with the new copy of the file, etc.
kinda stupid logic but it would basically be constantly writing data to the drive...

Batch script that would do that...

@echo off
echo Copying the first file...
set count=1
:loop
copy file1 file2
del file1
rename file2 file1
cls
echo file has been copied %count% times
set /a count=%count%+1
goto loop

although I'm sure there are programs that'll gladly write random 0's and 1's to the drive for x amount of times for you.

I think HD Tune will even allow you to write 0's to an entire drive up to 35 times with the click of a button. so you could do that several times if you want to test it's durability.

 

[SockMan!]

I generally do a full format. If it passes, then I run it through a gutmann wipe for a while. If I don't encounter issues and SMART checks out okay then I consider it good.

 

[Mr. B]

My first thought was a DoD grade wipe. I guess I'll do that and hold additional backups for a few weeks.

 

[PurduEE]

I ended up using HDTune with a batch file from a dos prompt to perform errorscans over and over..

My batch file looked something like this:

@echo off
cd \progra~1\hdtune~1\
call hdtune /disk:0 /errorscan /start /stop
call [name of batch file].bat

you'll need hdtunepro for the command line parameters and you'll need a registered copy, otherwise it comes up with a prompt when you start it up. If you want it, I can host the batch file for you to download, but it's pretty straight-forward.

I ran this batch file for around a week on a replacement 1TB drive from Seagate before I stuck it in my WHS box.

 

[Joe Average]

hehe Wanna really drive a drive batshit? Lemme tell ya how... you'll like this one.

Go here:

http://www.flexomizer.com/PermaLink,guid,ce99367e-158c-487a-879d-b32145cc1957.aspx

and grab the Whitney Defrag tool (yes, it's old, but it works GREAT for what I'm about to describe).

One of the coolest features of this amazing little tool - considering it's a defragger primarily - is a special mode of operation the author calls "the shotgun blast" because it does the exact opposite of a defrag operation: it purposely fragments the living hell out of a file or files to the absolute max it can be.

I used this tool for a defrag shootout I did (funny, shootout, shotgun blast... yeah, I get it) where I took a 20GB partition at the beginning of a hard drive I was using as my test media. I copied 1 single DVD VOB (doesn't matter which one as long as it's a single 1GB VOB file - they're exactly 1GB in size so rip one off a DVD of your choice if you want, or several of 'em, doesn't matter).

Now, here's where the Whitney Defrag tool comes in. You use the shotgun blast mode to purposely fragment that file (or whatever file you're going to use). Since the default will be to create as many fragments as possible, what I ended up with after blasting that 1GB file across that 20GB drive was this:

256,000 4KB chunks... do the math: 1GB (the VOB file) divided evenly by the 4KB cluster size on the 20GB NTFS partition = 256,000 chunks... the maximum theoretical blast that tool is capable of.

Needless to say when I looked at the fragmentation level with another defragger it showed 99.9% fragmentation.

Then I made an image of that partition for safe keeping (and I still have it someplace around here on a storage drive) and I use that for testing defraggers by pointing them to it and letting 'em run. PerfectDisk always wins that one, takes about 2 hours or so to put it back together with 0% fragmentation - all the others are way behind with O&O being the next fastest but that takes like 5 hours.

I might have to try that shootout again now that I have Velociraptors... should be faster.

Anyways, make no mistake: it might be a very tiny command line tool, but it's got a shitload of power in there. Use it to put some VOB files on whatever drive you want to give a good workout, then use the shotgun blast to purposely fragment them on the partition (best to use one big partition for this if you want to work the entire drive out) and let 'er rip.

That hard drive will scream, at least in terms of audible noise from the seeks/reads/writes, I promise.

(note: it doesn't work in Windows 7, and since it's not being updated any longer it most likely never will. I've used it with Win2K, XP, Win2K3 x86, Vista x86, and Win2K8 x86 (no 64 bit support at all), but apparently something in Windows 7 just doesn't like it and I've tried it from an Admin Command Prompt as well - the author states he's not planning to make changes to it just for Windows 7 so we'll see what happens).

So if you've got a machine with an older OS on it, hook the drive up to that and get 'er burning hot from all the drive mechanics going insane.

Also, if you ever wanted to see just how bad fragmentation can affect performance, the shotgun mode will most definitely slow most Windows boxes down to a slow crawl...