I was curious to see if I had any bad sectors on a set of drives (3x640GB = 1.8TB) I’ve owned since 2010, so I ran “badblocks -svn” on that drive and it took a little over three days to complete.
Some info about the drive setup:
- 3x 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black
- SATA 3.0 Gb/s
- RAID0
Some info on the badblocks command specifically:
- s – shows scan progress (percent completion)
- v – verbose mode
- n – non-destructive read-write mode and requires the drive to not be mounted (more info about the test mode below)
- block is first read
- test pattern then written into that block
- test pattern then read from that block
- compare the results from 2-3 to see if they’re the same
- put back the original block
Hopefully, this gives a reference for others who want to run this test so that they have an idea at least for how long the test would take. For a less thorough, but faster test, one can opt to do a non-destructive read test (leave out the “n” option) and it also does not care whether the disk is mounted or not.