HDD Test/"Break In" using dd
 

I have a new 3TB WD Red drive. I put it in my FreeNAS box and ran the following commands
with a little time in between.

After ~14 hours, I got the results:
I guess I never really worried about the output of the dd command when copying drives. I guess I was expecting both records in and out to end with "+0". Can someone explain my results and let me know if the results throw up any red flags?

It just means the device did not match a multiple of your buffer size. The "short write" indicates that the output device filled before the complete record was written. The +1 is the partial record that was read from the device.

So should I rerun the test with a different buffer size or are the results enough for me to implement my drive?

No real need to. The device is working.

Now there is still the possibility of an early death, but that would require about a month of random read/write activity, and is usually not worth the effort.

I'd suggest running the S.M.A.R.T. self tests on the drive to fully test it, e.g. "smartctl -t long /dev/XXX" and then "smartctl -l selftest /dev/XXX" to see the results. If you're feeling paranoid, you can also run badblocks, but it will take some time.

I kinda am on this one. I haven't bought an HDD since I got (4) 250 GB :eek: for my RAID almost (7) years ago. I bought this one on a sale but there were several reviews of failure after a month or so. Stressing it now would put me at ease as I am in need of this extra space before my library can get any bigger. I've transferred ~1TB to this drive already (just duplicate as I have my original data on my other drives). I'm pretty sure it won't, but the smartctl will not affect any data on the drive? I probably won't wait for an answer as I can just recopy the data if it does :).

TIA.

The smartctl tests are by default run in non-destructive mode. You can run them even with data on the drive and the partitions mounted and it will not affected anything.