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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Badblocks'ing a set of 8 drives, one drive is slower then the other seven. Is this an issue? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Howdy. So I'm in the process of building a new pool for my NAS. I have eight 18tb drives that I've burnin with Spearfoot's disk-burnin-and-testing script from GitHub. Everything has been going smooth so far at 65 hours in. I do have one possible issue however, one of the drives is testing at a slower rate then the others.

90.82% done, 65:24:36 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)	95.90% done, 65:24:51 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)	88.11% done, 65:24:43 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)	53.61% done, 65:24:35 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)
88.58% done, 65:24:38 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)	89.32% done, 65:24:49 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)	88.89% done, 65:24:46 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)	94.82% done, 65:24:37 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)

So these look good so far, the majority of the drives which are chugging along within + or - 5% of one another. While that top right drive that has fallen behind and is now -40% behind its peers and it continues to slowly fall away from the pack.

So my question is does this drive have an issue where its running at a slower speed to its peers or is this nothing to worry about? Once the burnin has finished I was thinking I would speed test each drive and see if anything shows up.

Any ideas or comments?

Thanks all.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I need to first say I have no experience with that burn in software, so I can't give any advice specific to that. With that being said it could be a few things. Obviously the drive could be bad, but it appears to have zero errors indicated so far. If these are shucked drives, it is possible that the one drive is a different model. When brands make external hard drives they will use multiple models, it is possible that 7 are a higher class model and the slower one is a lower class or otherwise different. Again I'm not familiar with the software, maybe something weird is going on with it and it is hitting that drive less. You might have an old or damaged sata cable that isn't allowing it to achieve full 6 gb connection. Some motherboards can have wonky setups with their sata controllers, maybe something is going on with that sata port.

I'd allow the test to complete, if it has errors then you know it is likely bad. Do a speed test, if it is noticeably different then try switching the sata cable from one drive to another to see if the problem follows the cable / port. Make sure all drives are formatted the same, maybe something funky happened with the formatting or the test runs different with different formats. I'd also check the drives with a different software like crystaldiskinfo and see what it says. It can tell you the rpm of the drive, firmware version, if there are any smart errors and more.