Anything besides First Aid to check for new drive issues?

[kat.hayes]

I just bought a new 14TB bare bones drive from Newegg that was only shipped with one layer of bubble wrap. I want to check it for any issues before beginning to use it as an external drive. I ran First Aid from Disk Utility and it just reported "Operation Successful" without any other details. Is there anything else I should do? Does this mean it is good to go?

Thanks.

 

[haralds]

Any S.M.A.R.T. tool should tell you the internal status and error counts.
Disk Utility will notify you if the drive reports have had errors. I would not worry about it.

I have used SMART Reporter for a long time, even when it was ShareWare. It's free.

 

[rpmurray]

I want to check it for any issues before beginning to use it as an external drive.

If you want to be extra sure there is nothing wrong with the drive you can do the following:

1. Download DriveDx (it has a free trial) and check to see if any of the Health Indicators show any problems. You can also run the Short Self-test and Full Self-test to see if you get any errors back.
2. Download SoftRAID (it has a free trial) and run Disk Certify against the disk. Be aware that this is a long (multi-day) process for a multi-terabyte drive, especially if you have it do multiple passes (I usually just do three), since it's writing and reading to every sector on the drive to test its integrity. It uses different patterns for each pass.

Edit: Your drive could be half dead and Disk Utility would still say the operation is successful. Disk Utility is next to worthless for checking the status of a drive.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Edit: Your drive could be half dead and Disk Utility would still say the operation is successful. Disk Utility is next to worthless for checking the status of a drive.

Indeed, they are different tools doing different things.

Disk Utility First Aid is checking for corruption of the directory, and repairing if it can.

DriveDX and SMARTutility look at the physical health of the drive by analysing the detailed SMART data sent by the drive, and reporting impending and anticipated failures, based on the SMART parameters. DriveDX and SMARTutiity do not check for directory corruption.

Disk Utility does report SMART status but does not analyse the SMART data for impending problems. So as you say by the time DU reports a SMART problem it is too late.

A physically failing drive may have a healthy directory and vice versa. But of course physical problems impact the directory structure sooner or later.

SoftRAID's writing/reading data is obviously another way to check but don't know if also reports SMART data. Other tools can do the same but I never have the patience to test a new drive this way, but sometimes use DriveDX.

Incidentally, Disk Utility always reports "Operation successful" even if it finds errors in the Directory Structure. It just means it was able to carry out the test successfully. If there are no errors it also says "Drive appears to be OK" a few lines above. It will also give the OK message if it only finds warnings.

At this time the fsck routine used by DU First Aid is only way of checking directory health of APFS formatted drives. Techtool Drive Genius etc use fsck. The old faithful Diskwarrior only works with HFS+.

 

[HDFan]

In addition to the above there is Techtool Pro which has a number of comprehensive disk tests:



I never use any of these on new disks. If you have purchased from a reputable vendor it isn't worth worring about it for these reasons:

1. If the packaging and the anti-static bag are sealed then the disk is likely new. You can check the serial number against the manufacturers warranty database on their website to verify the warranty.

2. If the disk works when you place it in an enclosure, formats correctly, then it it is good. What you are looking for are disks that won't even startup when they are new. Have had several of those, I think from NewEgg. Getting replacements was no problem.

3. Testing whether the disk is good, apart from the items above, is a bit useless due to the bathtub curve:


If every test on a new disk is perfect now it can still fail hours later due to Early Infant Mortality. There is no way to predict if this will happen, although if you look at Backblaze statistics you can see drives that have lower and higher failure rates over time. Note: the bathtub curve is changing, this is the classic version.

My recommendation: if the disk formats just use it. If it fails due to EIM just get the disk replaced, either by the seller or the manufacturer warranty. As always maintain your 3-2-1 backups.