Verifying new SSDs and Hard Drives

TidBITS Talk
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I’m searching for the best way to verify the integrity / reliability of new SSDs and hard drives (reading, writing, verifying every block). It’s important to test new storage devices before fully committing to them.

I’ve always used SoftRAID’s Certify feature, which recommends 3 complete passes for hard drives and at least 2 for SSDs. But now that it’s subscription-only, I’m not keen on spending $150 a year to verify new standalone drives that are not for a RAID. If anyone can suggest an alternative, that would be most helpful.

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Have you looked at DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility? Non-subscription, and reasonably priced.

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Thanks Will. DriveDx is great for quickly checking attributes and SMART indicators in a non-destructive way, interpreting statistics the drive is reporting. But, it does not format / initialize / write / verify all blocks on a drive before use. That verification process with SoftRAID can take days to complete.

I’m glad that DriveDx exists, since unfortunately SMART Utility and SMART Reporter don’t appear to be getting more updates.

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Last time I saw drive verification was when most servers were running NOVELL. With modern drive controllers and disk reliability several magnitudes better than in those days, is drive verification really still a thing?

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@mHm I still try to certify every drive, using SoftRAID. I’ve picked up a handful of drives over the last 5 years which have failed at some point in the process.

I don’t trust any drive manufacturer to deliver a quality product. As, IIRC, Ronald Reagan supposedly said, Trust but Verify.

It also appears that SoftRAID Standard is free and that might do that @Brian needs.

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Thanks Jonathan, I’ve had the same experience with some new drives not verifying (including things like USB flash drives, SD cards, etc).

Unfortunately, SoftRAID Standard (free edition) does not have the Certify feature. Users were complaining about the lack of this in their forum.

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Hmmm, that’s strange as I see Certify in the menu (which is as far as went previously). But, when I select it, I now see that I need Premium.

Well drat. I figured that if a command wasn’t greyed out and inaccessible, it was enabled. I see I was wrong in the assumption.

Of course, I’ve been running various versions of SoftRAID for probably 20 years, so I’ve upgraded time and again.

Sorry for getting your hopes up.