The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/glorpo on 2024-07-17 20:25:22.
I bought two 14TB Seagate EXOS X16's from ServerPartDeals because I heard refurb drives are good and cheap. I've only ever used external drives before. I had a hell of a time getting them to initialize - disk management constantly stopped responding, gave semaphore timeout errors etc., but eventually by plugging them in one at a time I was able to get them initialized and NTFS formatted. I copied some test files and checked SMART - both fine.
Ran HD Sentinel which someone recommended here. Immediately found hundreds of thousands of bad blocks. I was a bit alarmed, but the SMART data was still good, and I found this program may have some bugs related to this, so I tried disk-fill test: https://panthema.net/2013/disk-filltest/. It filled both drives completely and verified the contents after about a day and a half each which seems like a reasonable speed. After that I was satisfied they were good and started backing up files to them. They were fine for a couple weeks after that.
HOWEVER, today I had the return of the semaphore timeout, parameter is incorrect, disk management not responding nightmare. After switching USB ports (both are 3.0) they loaded up fine and the data seems to be safe. I switched back and got the same problem as before. Is this a case of the USB port failing? It doesn't seem to have problems with other use cases like mice, or even my smaller external drives.
I'm kind of terrified, because I don't want to be in a two-is-none situation. I haven't yet deleted anything from my previous full drives that I copied to these new ones, so I currently have four copies of everything. I'm thinking of buying a third, different model of similar capacity just for peace of mind, but I'm just really not 110% confident these drives are good. Is there some way I could test the USB port to definitively prove that THAT is the issue? I don't want to end up getting a new computer and end up being unable to plug them into ANY of its ports.