SmartCTL and Badblocks Questions

[Temereen64]

Greetings Everyone,

I am testing my hard drives and had a question about smartctl and badblocks. I have begun to go through the various smartctl test. I finally got to the smartctl long test on my very first hard drive of 24. It responded with a time of 450 minutes to complete. Is there a way I can test multiple hard drives simultaneously as doing this one at a time will take forever.

1. Can I open multiple terminals and perform Smartctl long in each terminal (24 terminals) each with a different hard drive being tested? (Same question for badblocks)

2. I have read that there are scripts out there that can perform functions like this, yet I am not quite up to the level of writing a script that could do such. Does anyone have a script they could post that I could copy and use?

Thanks in advance.

 

[winnielinnie]

S.M.A.R.T. tests are done within each drive itself, independently of the active terminals or the operating system. Once a drive gets the signal to do an internal test, you don't need to leave any terminal or window open. As long as it's getting power, it's running its test. You can check on the status with smartctl -a /dev/ada0 and checking the section near the top named "Self-execution status".

As for badblocks, that's another story. Badblocks is reading and writing to the drive through a data bus, such as SATA or USB. It will take SIGNIFICANTLY longer. You can possibly disown the process (& disown) to let it run in the background, though you'll need to keep an eye on the running processes to see when it finishes.

You're looking at over a week, per drive, using badblocks on some of the larger capacities.

 

[Sumppi]

The resources section contains excellent guides, and I recommend reading Hard Drive Burn-in Testing
Badblocks can be executed in parallel for all drives with tmux, see the guide for details.