Re: About USB hard drives and errors
On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:44:33 -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> 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.
(...)
Try passing the SMART test (by using the manufacturer's test disk or
"smartctl", but as they are attached to a USB port, smartmontools may
have problems to detect and scan the device).
It won't tell you a concrete number of "bad blocks", but higher values in
"Reallocated Sectors Count" could give you an idea about the remapping
operations performed by the disk (the lower the better).
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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