New Hard Drive Burn-in Ritual

Reference: https://perfectmediaserver.com/06-hardware/new-drive-burnin/

1. Run sudo lshw -C disk to see the drive name.
2. Grab the burn-in script if you don’t have it already.
3. Make sure you have tmux installed.
4. Create a new tmux session: tmux new -s burnin
5. Run the burn-in script on the new drive: ./disk-burnin.sh -f -o ~/burn-in-logs REPLACE-ME. Make sure the drive name here is correct!* E.g. sda, sdb, etc.
   1. By default it passes -b and -c to badblocks, with default values of 8192 and 64 respectively. You can override the block size to match the sector size of the disk, but for the purpose of determining whether the drive needs to be RMA’d it doesn’t really matter. And increasing concurrency can tax the system more, so tbh you can just leave the defaults.
   2. For -b, use lsblk -o NAME,PHY-SeC /dev/sdd to check the sector size of your disk and use that.
   3. For -c, in theory higher numbers will go faster but stress out the disk more and use up more memory. So perhaps leave this alone?
6. Wait a long while (e.g. a 12tb on Intimidator took roughly 13 hours). Since you’re in tmux, you can exit with Ctrl+B then D (think Vim commands), and the process will keep running in the background.
7. You can check in on the process with:
   1. tmux capture-pane -p -t burnin | tail -n 100
      1. Just prints out the last 100 lines
   2. tmux attach -r -t burnin
      1. Attaches in read-only mode so accidental keystrokes don’t mess with it.

As an aside, ext4 filesystems reserve 5% of space which on large drives is a huge waste. You can fix this with commands like sudo tune2fs -m 0.1 /dev/sda1 which sets the percentage to reserve. Keep it in the realm of 1 - 10 gb.

Although I think the latest version of perfect media server is now recommending xfs instead of ext4.