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Comment by mceachen | Hacker News Reader

This article has an unfortunate omission by ignoring drives' S.M.A.R.T. reporting system which can give a surprisingly thorough view into drive metadata, like how many blocks have been remapped due to media corruption.

After running `badblocks`, run `smartctl -t long $DEVICE`, which is a "long" self-test. This will take upwards of a day to complete, depending on the drive.

After that completes, check the status by running `smartctl --all $DEVICE`, and verify that there are only zeroes in the RAW_VALUE column for Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot, and Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt.

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It's also very illuminating to check SMART stats on "new" drives that show hundreds of on/off cycles or other evidence that the drives are not, in fact, new.

Pro tip: Many, many drives sold on Amazon by large, "reputable" suppliers are not new in the way you think they are - they are "new pulls" from systems integrators that received them as part of the complete PC and then pulled them, en masse, to sell in bulk.

Those "new pulls" may have hundreds and hundreds of hours on them ...

We (rsync.net) have started trending towards B&H Photo for larger batches of drives ... they pack them cluefully and there is no "new pull" monkey-business ... unfortunately they don't always have the quantity on-hand that we require, but that's not a knock against them ...

> they pack them cluefully

Yeah, that's why amazon is a hard no for hard drive buys for me. I don't mind when a lot of things are bouncing around in an oversized shipping box with insufficient padding, or in a box with cat litter, but a hard drive should be shipped responsibly, and I can't reasonably expect that from amazon.

Wow, so I guess people are buying new PCs and essentially scrapping them for parts? That's....... actually kind of funny

When I bought my present laptop, it was about $200 cheaper to order the min-spec (4G RAM/500G hard disc) and add aftermarket RAM and SSD upgrades than to buy it the way I wanted from the maker.

I could imagine a firm that ordered 1000 units and did (or contracted out for) the same upgrades, now has 1000 unneeded 500-gig hard drives they can unload cheap.

Probably not new PCs. But I know a lot of Enterprise-tier clients that do a 3-5 year refresh of hardware. And no shortage of business that fail or need to offload new-ish hardware.

Rip out the HDDs, RAM DIMMs, etc. and resell as "new" for extra $$$.

Why not just buy direct from the manufacturer?

You need really high quantities.

At moderate quantities, Intel and SSD makers do backend deals to get rebate credits to a PC OEM.

When I bought lots of computers, we would usually get -1-3% margins.

> This article has an unfortunate omission by ignoring drives' S.M.A.R.T. reporting system

TFA states:

I have taken to using a 'burnin' script to wrap smartctl tests before and after in order to have relatively high confidence that the drive will not fail soon.

...

The script I used can be found on Github here

Agree this could be discussed in a bit more detail, but it is actually there.

Better yet, run `smartctl -t conveyance $DEVICE` first, which will run a short (few minutes) test to check for transport damage. `smartctl -a $DEVICE` also reports self test results, so always check those as well.

I've found that recent drives (wd & hgst) didn't support conveyance.

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