Sent from my Android device.
On Aug 6, 2012 4:22 PM, "Paul Hartman" <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Howdy,
> >
> > I finally got me a 3Tb drive on the way.  Should be here Wednesday.  I
> > have seen some reviews where it would not work right.  I think some of
> > it may be BIOS related since some BIOS's don't like drives that large.
> > Anyway, I want to test this thing real good to really make sure it is up
> > to the task before putting my data on it.  It's going to be so much
> > data, there is really no way to do back-ups at this point.  Come on, 2
> > to 3Tbs on 4Gb DVDs.  Really?  lol  Maybe a external drive later on but
> > for now, well.
> >
> > I have heard of bonnie and friends.  I also think dd could do some
> > testing too.  Is there any other way to give this a good work and see if
> > it holds up?  Oh, helpful hints with Bonnie would be great too.  I have
> > never used it before.  Maybe someone has some test that is really brutal.
>
> I wouldn't want to torture the drive, but just make sure it works.
>
> What I do: boot parted magic liveCD, run ATA SECURE ERASE on the drive
> (you probably need to suspend and awaken your machine to unlock the
> drive, the GUI tool in the liveCD does this for you automatically),
> that will do factory reformat/low-level reformat, then run SMART full
> test which can take many hours. If it survives both of those, and
> doesn't make audible clicking noises in the process, I feel confident
> that it is in working order.
>
> Those steps are more important if I'm testing a used or refurbished
> drive, for a new drive you may want to skip the secure erase and only
> do the smart test. If SMART test passes then I don't think there's any
> reason to run badblocks, but you can have it run during mkfs if you
> want reassurance.
>
>