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Lost partition table, can i trust the HDD again?
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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While it's true we don't really need those old tools anymore, unless one have ancient hardware. On Linux we can use
badblocksto test the hard drive. This is from Arch Wiki:So, for most cases SMART data is actually sufficient. And there is badblocks if you want to check the entire disk. However we don't have manufacturer tools like Windows has.
A little warning about badblocks. Don't do a write test if you have important stuff on it because it will erase the disk.
As a computer technician I have seen hundreds of times the drive and smart data didn't actually know what was going on and it took quality tools to alert the driver to what was happening to start work.
If the drive's firmware is faulty, SMART data will be faulty too. But can you say the percentage is somewhat high from what you dealt with, a little statistics? What I saw is my personal experience and it's definitely wouldn't be accurate as yours. I only saw a drive died out of nowhere a handful of times which is not high if I make it into a percentage.Though if the drive itself is faulty, it won't take long for it to die too.
The best I saw is a WD Caviar Black 500 GB drive from 2011 we use, still kicking. Took a backup because of its age a couple years ago but haven't died yet. The worst I saw was my friend's NVMe SSD that died in 3 months after he installed. Probably its firmware was also faulty because SMART didn't help that time.
It's nothing to do with faulty firmware, it's that smart will only see 1 in 3 issues and as such is simply not good enough to use as actual diagnostics.
I see. So, you're saying that occasionally checking
smartctl(or havingsmartdas a daemon continuously), runningbadblockstime to time and maybe checkingiostatnot really enough? I mean, Linux is by far the most used OS on servers and datacenters, if these are not enough someone would write a proper tool I guess, don't you think?Not at all. It takes a huge amount of work to do so, and the benefit of using raid etc is redundancy so they can afford for things to fail. Smart mon tools is a great example, the software is great but it needs it's database to support that drives functions to work well and they can't and don't support everything.