Filesystem Basics

 Testing new disks

When getting new disks it is good practice to make sure they are not dead on arrival, for this using badblocks is a great tool. It will write a certain pattern to all sectors and read it again to make sure it is there. Usually it will do multiple passes with different patterns to verify.

The following command is destructive

sudo badblocks -b 4096 -wsv <disk>

The arguments mean the following:

-b 4096 set the badblocks blocksize to 4096, this is needed if your disks are larger than 4TB as badblocks stores the amount of blocks in a 32-bit integer
-w do a destructive write test
-s show progress
-v be verbose and print found badblocks to stdout