The poor packaging probably was not helpful either.
@BLinux. I use stablebit scanner and hdd sentinel to test used disks. Can badblocks be run parallely on multiple disks? Do you have a script you can share?
I don't really have a script per say. I do run them in parallel. In the "other" deal, I pop the drives into a 24 bay chassis with direct attached backplane and run in Linux:
# screen (I run badblocks in 'screen' so I can logout and come back to check on it)
# nohup badblocks -b 32768 -c 512 -wsv /dev/sdX &
# tail -f nohup.out
(hit ctrl-a-d to detach from screen)
Then, rinse and repeat the above for each drive, but be in a different directory so they don't overwrite the nohup.out file. The -b and -c settings were ones I chose that seem to give me the fastest throughput; but feel free to tweak them.
... BUT... now that you've mentioned it, it may be worth writing a script to make this simple, especially if one is testing a few dozen drives at a time... I'll post something on github when I have time to write a script for this.