Yesterday I bought my first "big" refurb hard drives (2x12TB HGST drives, upgrade from a 2TB and 4TB drive).
The current plan is to have one in my computer, and use the second as a backup with an external enclosure. Probably not the "best" way to do it, but it should suffice in the meantime.
Currently waiting for them to ship and looking into the whole testing process in the meantime.
I was wondering what would be the best way to test them, as I've read about a bunch of different ones (like smartctl, Badblocks, HD Sentinel, etc.) And it's making my head spin a bit.
I guess my questions are as followed:
- What/how many tests need to be run on a refurb drive? I've seen some posts listing multiple long tests and others just saying a few SMART tests. Is there any general consensus?
- Badblocks is on Linux only, would that work on something like WSL? Or would I have to get a Linux machine/VM setup? I have a Pi 3 collecting dust, could that be used?
- How long would testing the drives take? I've seen that a full badblocks 4 pass run can take days or even a week of 24/7 running just for one drive. Does that sound right? I was thinking about using a secondary machine like my old Thinkpad if it was going to take a week. My desktop (where the drive will eventually end up) is in use daily, and I'd be a bit concerned about leaving it on but not killing the test accidentally.
I'm a bit new to all this, only having a 2TB and 4TB drive for the past few years. Any help in making sense of all this would be appreciated.