Yes, tip number 1: never buy an used HDD
Tip number 2: check smart if there are relocated sectors return it
Tip number 3: run badblocks on the drive, (-w mode) and if there are no errors then check smart again, if there are errors or relocated sectors return the drive
Good luck!
Your tip 1 isn’t good for all situations. I have a 4 drive RAID 10 setup I have zero issues putting a used drive in after I test and inspect. Used doesn’t mean trash, it’s all situational.
Also, backup backup backup.
And “used” could be used wrong here, I typically use serverpartdeals and get 20TB+ drive sizes, refurbished. They come with a 5 year warranty and will get them replaced if there are issues.
Yes, tip number 1: never buy an used HDD
That’s not a good tip.
It’s the best tip, buying an used HDD is asking for trouble
Incorrect again.
What kind of HDD? for what purpose? For what budget?
“Don’t buy used” is a dumb tip because it means nothing and addresses nothing.
I use a WD Enterprise HDD from 2012. I bought it used. It passes all tests with flying colours, zero issues so far… it keeps a mirror of my backup. It’s not my main backup, it’s a copy of a copy. Guess what? I paid an extremely low price for it as a student on a budget, yet it was already proven useful many times both for the backups but also to keep my torrents seeding for longer, and it if does indeed fail… no biggie, not even my backup is compromised.
There are excellent refurbished HDDs too. Either way, “don’t buy used” is the kind of blanket statement somebody cosplaying as a infosec home lab data specialist comments on Lemmy, but means absolutely nothing and offers no useful advice.
i have many hgst renewed drives, just use HD Sentinel its fine
I bought a used external HDD for the interfaces - esata, usb3, FireWire 800. Lets me move data at max speed between my iBook, MacBook, pc…
…turns out it was stolen. :(
if it’s a traditional/old style with a spinning magnetic disc, listen for clicking sounds as it reads, if you hear clicks it’s probably about to die, don’t put anything valuable on it.
Infamous advice after purchasing questions
What kind of HDD did you get?
I’m trying to decide between a PATA IDE drive for authenticity or getting a new controller board for my PS2 to use a SATA drive I already have laying around. It’d certainly be easier to use the sata drive but like… Authenticity tho
Emulator and save the PS2 for all posterity?
Naur lol.
The PS2 is already slightly modded, got it at a retro shop.
Since the seals are broken, and work has already been done I have no qualms about modding it further.
Also I don’t have an emulator that can output to a CRT sooooo…
I just need freeHDloader and OPL on it because the motors in the optical drive are beginning to burn out.
don’t order used SSD.
I don’t buy used HDDs, or brake pads, or helmets, or climbing rope, or…
Condoms
You can install Linux on it. And occasionally backup all personal files
Don’t look at it.
Boot into a linux live usb
Run
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<driveid>I probably didn’t get that perfect, but, close enough. Look it up on the internet or check the
manpage idkDon’t look at it??
When it comes to ols drives, looking is half the fun.
What is this where did my OS go?
I love dd. Hate using USB programs to burn iso they are all different and weird but man dd is great.
I don’t mind dd when I’m not in a hurry, but I usually prefer to just use the built in KDE disk utility. I’m pretty sure its based on Parted and DD under the hood.
You guys are ordering packages?
I used to order packages when I had money a long time ago. It was pretty cool. AMA.
Tip: keep refreshing the tracking page every 60 seconds. This makes the parcel travel even faster.
Make sure you use a red theme (maybe with flames) for your browser.
Little known fact: refreshing the tracking page not only tells the company that you are invested in your package’s arrival time, this telling them to prioritize it, it also pumps electrons into the cardboard so that it is attracted to the fastest moving delivery vehicle.
(Just kidding, neither of these things are true.)
No it’s like bittorrent downloads, if you look at it it goes slower!
For me it goes faster for some reason when I look at it but gets slower when I look away
Probably the OS saying “nuh uh, if you don’t have the window focused then i’il cap his download speed”
The magic packet fairies are no different than us. Move the data when the boss is looking, and have some fun when they walk away.
Recover the data on it. Burn it with fire. Cry because you saw what it was.
Ask yourself why there is a school report on an animation studio on the “new” laptop your “stepmothers” mother bought and used towards the end as she lost her senses thinking people were spying on her trying to hide everything from “the them” deleting what ever she thought was spying on her.
hi what
An Oddly specific example, that could have happened to anyone… me.
Ignore it I have issues and constantly want to talk about myself.
No it’s cool
I uh
I’m sorry you went through that. Glad you have a sense of humor about it
It wasn’t that bad, mostly sad to see all the images she removed, and difficult to find everywhere the credit cards where used because she removed all emails and text messages.
Is this a reference?
theatrically turn away from the tracking page and make it feel like you don’t care, it can smell your fear, the same way a printer does, and it’ll then arrive a day after you need it the most
When it finally arrives you should run some tests to ensure the drive is not bad. This repo is a decent resource: https://github.com/Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing
If it’s a spinning disk hard drive then do a low level format i.e. do a security write zeros on the whole disk (be sure to delete all partitions first). This will try to write a zero to every single sector, and any bad sectors will be removed from use.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Badblocks
dd /dev/urandom after if you’re encrypting the disk
I don’t think you need to delete the partitions separately, since it’s just a table at the very beginning of which parts of the disk belong to which partition?
So if you
ddzeroes over everything, the first thing that gets deleted is the partitioning tableI might be wrong here, or maybe it doesn’t apply to every situation, but that’s how I’ve understood it to work
Also a tip for OP: don’t write zeroes over it, but random data (
dd if=/dev/urandom ...). It’s a bit more secure as it makes it harder to see the size and location of the encrypted data on the diskI’ve found that on some systems and some utility apps, if there are partitions present then doing a zeroing pass only zeros the partition rather than the entire drive itself
I’m guessing that is not dd
Yeah, dd does as told and doesn’t care about your tears about the stupid typo
Correct, it was the built it disk utility app on Mac. I had a giant drive with a few partitions and clicked to do a zero pass and it finished in a half second. Obviously there was no way it completed that fast. I did some empirical testing based on completion time and sure enough it only zeroes a single partition rather than the entire disk
I miss when Disk Utility was good and simple and predictable on MacOS. It’s such steaming shit now.
use data recovery software to find out what used to be on there
Porn… guaranteed
Just hope it’s legal porn.
Quick way to turn a 12tb drive into a 8tb drive on arrival.
i heard trump has pedobytes of porn stashed…
What do you think the giant Utah data centre is for?
14 year old’s snapchat nudes.
oh, i figured it was for spying on everyone but that makes more sense
