I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are
for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on
several of them and started experimenting. The results so far
are puzzling.
I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives
I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest
cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB.
e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them
to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4
hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad
blocks it found.