Disks

I had the good fortune to get a nice deal on some Seagate EXOS hard drives from serverpartdeals.com

These are "manufacturer-recertified" HDDs, so they used to live in a datacenter somewhere.

SMART testing the disks

It stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology"

This is a self-reporting diagnostic tool provided by a drive's firmware.

You can also try writing 0 to every single sector on the drive and see if any sectors are not all 0.

Tools

I tried badblocks originally, but it can't handle a hard drive with more than 2³² blocks.

In a pinch, Arch Wiki recommends smartctl or writing 0 to the device. I decided on a long smart test.

      # could also write 0s
      # cryptsetup open /dev/sda new_hard_drive_1 --type plain --cipher aes-xts-plain64
      # shred -v -n 0 -z /dev/mapper/new_hard_drive_1
      # cmp -b /dev/zero /dev/mapper/new_hard_drive_1
      man smartctl # is your friend
      # Decided to use smartmontools
      # Sketches me out that it was recognized at /dev/sda. Nevertheless.
      sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sda # starts long test, it says to wait 1742 minutes (~29 hours) to finish. I started
      about 2025-01-08 13:00.
      sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda # "Print a large amount of SMART information for drive /dev/sda"
    

Power draw

HDDs draw both 5V and 12V power; spinning a platter 7200 times a minute is hard work.

Based on the product manual for my HDDs, that looks like:

Board

Power

Assuming I want to scale this out to 5 drives at some point, and erring on the side of caution:

I would need at least 30 W of 5V, and 150 of 12V

Even with a couple of fans, 200W might be enough. that's a pretty small PSU.

Bet I can find one on server part deals