WD Data Lifeguard extended test.

replica9000 · 03-25-2015, 03:20 PM

I'm currently 20 hours in a 66 hour (estimated) run of the extended test of a 2TB external drive. I've recently zero'd out the drive with shred -v -n0 -z and there were no errors reported. Do you think the extended test is unnecessary? I had an issue copying a couple files from it before, but perhaps it was a filesystem issue and not a hardware issue.

yooy · 03-26-2015, 07:51 AM

doesn't running such test on hard drive decrease its lifetime?

replica9000 · 03-26-2015, 12:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yooy

doesn't running such test on hard drive decrease its lifetime?

Not sure. I suppose it could with the platters spinning for a few days straight. Windows BSOD'd shortly after posting this, so only got about 1/3 of the way through the test.

jefro · 03-26-2015, 07:33 PM

Those tests are the only way to be sure.

Run Memtest on it for a few days.

Any number of issues from power to faulty caps to heat or cold solder to faulty timers and so on and on.

See if bios has a failsafe or default setting maybe. Slow memory if possible a bit. Check that memory is compatible with mb and all settings correct.

replica9000 · 03-27-2015, 01:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefro

Those tests are the only way to be sure.

Run Memtest on it for a few days.

Any number of issues from power to faulty caps to heat or cold solder to faulty timers and so on and on.

See if bios has a failsafe or default setting maybe. Slow memory if possible a bit. Check that memory is compatible with mb and all settings correct.

No RAM issues here. Was running a test on an older Western Digital 2TB My Book. I had freshly formatted it to transfer files to another PC. During the transfer, I had trouble getting two files.

I have recently done the shred command on it, and no issues were reported. At this point, it could have just been a filesystem error (ext4 on LVM2).

jefro · 03-27-2015, 04:36 PM

This is the reason for servers with all the expensive stuff like special ecc ram.

At one time there used to be an easy way to set copy to write/verify instead of write and hope.