Review on WD Blue 1TB Hard Drive by Erik Wesley

Whenever you get a new hard drive, run a bad block scan, preferably the standard 4-pass write/read test. If you're itching, do 2 passes or ctrl-c when you're done with checking the 2nd/3rd. transit are finished. Then examine the SMART data to see if there is: Reallocated Sector Count*, Reallocated Sector Count*, Current Pending Sector Count*, Bad Sector Count*, Write Error Rate, 0 to a small number of Read Errors ( some fields and values are different). between drives and manufacturers, but the sector/remapping fields should always be 0). Once you start getting bad sectors, replace the drive as soon as possible. To check the hard drive: Download and launch the Linux distribution. This process takes many hours to days depending on drive speed, drive size, USB and SATA, chipset and computer, etc. Open a terminal (or not in a shell yet), then type: sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 (or 512 if it's an old drive. Type "fdisk -l", to show sector format 512 or 4096) /dev/sdX (X is your specific device), Example: pass sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 /dev/. There is an optional parameter -c that specifies the number of blocks to process at once, it may or may not increase speed. If you use it, try -c 131072 or -c 65536 or -c 32768 or -c 16384. Can be useful when testing multiple disks at the same time. Try running it with -c [xxxxxx] for 10-20 seconds, or leave it out and press Ctrl-C after 20 seconds - do this for 3-4 different block speeds to see which ones at 20 seconds ( or some other interval) advances furthest you expect). For me it was best to leave the -c option. What you do is train the disk and write everything: patterns of 00000000s, 11111111s, 10101010s and 01010101s across the disk space and verify that every bit it writes to disk was written correctly. Usually (not always) a bad drive is detected sooner rather than later, so practice carefully with the new drive to determine if the drive is bad. - Year warranty. A mid-range HDD used to come with a 3 year (sometimes 5) year warranty. Yes, it's good to know that when you buy a new hard drive you don't have to count on using it for a few days until you test it! This is just your data. . .