What linux software do you use to check the health of used hard drives?

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uberguru

Active Member
Jun 7, 2013
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I bought a couple of 400GB SAS SSD drives on ebay and when i tries to check the health to see how much life is left, i only used smartctl
but i really like the windows software that makes it so easy to see

the software also can do performance tests to see what the performance values are for the drives
for linux it is a bit of looking and trying to see where these values are

anyways here is what i get from the smartctl but wondering if there is a better tool out there to make it easy to just show much much health is left in percentage etc instead of me having to do the calculations myself from the half useful outputs of smartctl commands

Code:
~# smartctl -a /dev/sdc
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.8.0-45-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               WDC
Product:              WUSTR6440ASS200
Revision:             K960
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        400,088,457,216 bytes [400 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Physical block size:  4096 bytes
LU is resource provisioned, LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Form Factor:          2.5 inches
Logical Unit id:      0x5000cca0a5000d6c
Serial number:        V4V00XRS
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-4)
Local Time is:        Sun Oct 27 18:38:36 2024 UTC
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Percentage used endurance indicator: 0%
Current Drive Temperature:     25 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        60 C

Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 99:20
Manufactured in week 39 of year 2018
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  0
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  0
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  0
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  0
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0        0         0         0          0      14265.557           0
write:         0        0         0         0          0      16522.808           0

Non-medium error count:       65

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Default           Aborted (device reset ?)    -       0                 - [-   -    -]

Long (extended) Self-test duration: 1320 seconds [22.0 minutes]
 

uberguru

Active Member
Jun 7, 2013
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honestly i dont believe those power on hours. these are used drives from ebay and if you look at the read and writes, how is that power on hours likely true?

am suspecting the health reporting might have been tampered with or something. which is why i am trying to use a different software to compare
 

pimposh

hardware pimp
Nov 19, 2022
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you can try disk sentinal.
Although i am not a fan of Windows, Hard Disk Sentinel Pro has one nice feature which is read/write surface scan with time measurement for each page/block written.

You can catch up weaker NAND/HDD sectorsjust by seeing they perform worse and expect relocation soon (if avail). Look around the web for discount codes and you can have family licence for pizza money. Worth it.

Since you are asking about Linux tools specifically, i'd stick to vendor tools if you have access to em (WDC had smth with funny name i can't recall now, also WDDCS Tool for enclousures). Or alternatively gui for cli tools like GSmartControl
 
Last edited:

TrevorH

New Member
Oct 25, 2024
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16522GB is only 41 drive writes on a 400GB SSD, easily achievable in 99 hours. Yes, I suspect all drive stats on secondhand drives but this is not showing an impossible number of writes in the alleged timespan.
 
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uberguru

Active Member
Jun 7, 2013
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you can try disk sentinal.
is that same as crystaldiskmark?

 

nabsltd

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2022
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honestly i dont believe those power on hours. these are used drives from ebay and if you look at the read and writes, how is that power on hours likely true?
I have drives with weird power-on hours. I have one that has been in continuous use for over 5 years and shows less than a few weeks in most software that decodes SMART. I have another one that shows as being powered on for years longer than the disk has been available for sale.

I generally only care about writes on SSDs, and remapped sectors on spinning rust. But, if the SMART data was wiped from the disks before resale, your only real choice is some sort of intensive test, like badblocks in write mode.
 
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