this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Got my HDDs delivered. How can I test them all before putting real data on them? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Looks handy!

Would that default 8096 block size be large enough for 18TB HDDs, or would I have to go higher?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think 8192 is high enough, since 4096 only breaks after something like 16TB.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why would it “break”? Isn’t the 4096 the block size setting?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yes, but badblocks only supports 32 bit values. If you chose a small block size like 4096 the final block number will be too large to fit into 32 bit and it will choke. You can either use 8192 or do multiple runs of 4096 by specifying an end block smaller than 32 bit. More information