Question about burning in new HDDs?

[EvanVanVan]

Reading jgreco's Burn-in and testing thread (http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.17750/), I've got a couple of questions.

1) Individual sequential read and write tests. This is basically just using "dd if=/dev/da${n} of=/dev/null bs=1048576" to do a read test, and "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da${n} bs=1048576" to do a write test. Note the reported read/write speeds at the end and compare them to both the other drives in the pool and also any benchmark stats you can find for that particular drive on the Internet. They should be very close.

2) Simultaneous sequential read and write tests. This is using those same tests in parallel.

3) I am kind of lazy so I will then have it do seek testing by starting multiple tests per drive and separating them by a minute or two each. The drives will do lots of seeking within a relatively small locality. Other people like to use different tools to do this; I have absolutely no objection but as I noted I'm kind of lazy.

1. Are those tests I can do from a Terminal within FreeNAS, or do I need to do what I'm currently doing and running them from a Ubuntu Live USB stick?

2. I'm assuming those commands will finish at some point? Right now I just started one write test in a single Terminal window since I don't know how long they will take to finish. Any ideas how long for a 3TB drive?

3. The third instruction there, he's just referring to the first two instructions, correct? He's recommending to just combine the read and write tests like he says in #2, and off set them by a minute or so for each drive, to speed up the overall testing process, right?

Thanks

 

[Yatti420]

badblocks can be run from command line.. As can smart tests etc.. I'm in the process as we speak.. These tests should take awhile!.. If my new drives are going to fail I want them to fail sooner rather then later..

Start with something like (if discs are new)..

SMART Short on all disks..
SMART long on all disks..
badblocks on all disks..
SMART Short on all disks..
SMART long on all disks..
badblocks on all disks..

Yes those dd commands can be run from the CLI.. I would just skip them and run badblocks.. The block size of the dd seems pretty large?

Some people recommend thousands of hours of testing.. You can always use something like hdat2 to test aswell..

 

[EvanVanVan]

Badblocks is better/more specific for testing the drives over just randomly reading and writing to them?

And dammnnnn doing that entire process twice? I have short tested and just finished long testing all of my drives today. Reading about DD it sounds like its going to take forever especially on eight 3tb drives. I might just risk it after this round of dd reads/writes.