Testing New Hard Drives Revision as of Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 19:57 UTC

Find out the disks on the system

 cat /var/run/dmesg.boot

Run the short test in the background¹.

 smartctl -t short /dev/ada0

Then run a conveyance test (for any damage during shipping)

 smartctl -t conveyance /dev/ada0

Then check for bad
blocks². This is a
2-phase, 4-pass command that will take a long time. On a 4TB WD Red,
each phase took ~8 hours.

 badblocks -ws /dev/ada0

Then run a long test

 smartctl -t long /dev/ada0

The -a flag shows you everything about the drives

 smartctl -a /dev/ada0

including the time remaining for the tests

 Self-test execution status:      ( 249) Self-test routine in progress...
                                         90% of test remaining.

and the time it would take to run the tests:

 Short self-test routine
 recommended polling time:    (   2) minutes.
 Extended self-test routine
 recommended polling time:    ( 529) minutes.
 Conveyance self-test routine
 recommended polling time:    (   5) minutes.

To see the results after the tests have run

 smartctl -l selftest /dev/ada0

References

• Interpreting badblocks
  data.

Footnotes