I have two Kesu brand HDDs purchased on Aliexpress with HGTS and WD HDDs, CrystalDiskInfo says that their health is good but I suspect that the Chinese reset SMART or changed the firmware to not show bad sector and badblock errors. A quick scan with some HDD testing software, for example Victoria, HDTune, Seatools, HD Sentinel, can reveal the real health condition of the HDDs and if they are good for archiving?
“A quick scan” is never the place to start testing hard drives; you’ll want a decent burn-in period. Depending on the size, this can easily take over a week. Here’s what I used most recently for this purpose:
My HDD is 1TB
Doesn’t the quick scan reveal the real health status of the HDDs?
Do the Chinese reset SMART or modify the firmware so that no bad sectors are shown in any scan?
No, not really. There’s no way a 7-minute-long test can check every sector, even on that small of a disk.
No idea, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
If you care about the data you’re going to put on the disk, it’s worth the time to test it properly.
Website Victoria software says: The graph is built on 188 points, evenly distributed over the tested volume of the drive. The result is visually and numerically identical to a full 4-hour scan, except for finding defects. It is for examining known good drives to measure the main parameters: speed at the beginning and end, access time, behavior with different block sizes, and also for comparing different devices by technical characteristics. Graphs can be saved to files and loaded back into the program.
I didn’t understand that
The bold I added there is kind of important.
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quick scan does not provide any HDD health information to update CrystalDiskInfo SMART data?
is there any difference between buying a HDD from China and just viewing CrystalDiskInfo information vs buying a HDD from China and performing a Quick surface scan after viewing CrystalDiskInfo?
SMART data is stored on the disk. It would only be updated by a “quick scan” if the quick scan resulted in an error reading one of the requested sectors.
You are using TrueNAS, right? I’m assuming so, since you’re on the TrueNAS forum. If so, it would generally be preferred to use tools available in TrueNAS. I don’t know what tools you’re using or what they’re telling you.
i used Victoria software
WD and HGTS HDD with Kesu case bought on Aliexpress I suspect they reset the SMART to show no health errors and few hours of use or modified the firmware so it hides errors from being detected by test software the Victoria quick test reveals something?
If you want to be sure that the drive doesn’t have bad sectors you need to run a surface scan in Victoria, that’s the closest to a badblocks test. I have no idea if it’s possible to swap bad sectors via firmware without it being noticed by a read/write utility test like this one, but your only other option is filling the drive with files completely and then comparing a before and after checksum of every file.
Does the victoria quick test work to reveal the true health of the HDD or just the several hour test? I think the Chinese just reset SMART or modified the firmware to hide the errors
Haven’t I already answered this question? Haven’t their own docs answered this question? No, it doesn’t.
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use HDDs for archiving
HDDs purchased on AliExpress, do the data recorded on them easily become corrupted if I do not perform a Full Scan Surface with Victoria to find out the true health of the drive? I only performed the QuickScan Surface of Victoria and there were no errors
When I copied the files to the HDD, I then tested them with Winrar and they were intact, but do they easily become corrupted in unused storage or the next time I power them on?
Health disk status mean nothing on validate integrity of data stored inside…
Sectors do go bad over time–as you’ve already been told. If there’s data on those sectors, that can result in data corruption–as you’ve also already been told. That’s why you run scrubs, and that’s why you set up pools with redundancy. “Easily” is something I don’t think anyone can answer.