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Managing Disks - Certify, Verify, Initialize
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Topic starter
I would appreciate learning SoftRAID's thoughts on the advisability of performing Certification's on a periodic basis. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about certifying prior to putting a drive to use. I am thinking about drives that have been in use, without an errors reported by SoftRAID. It is advisable to run a certification on them periodically, for example, once per year?
I also appreciate the responses from SoftRAID on this forum. They are typically comprehensive and useful.
Posted : 19/12/2018 1:06 pm
Once a disk has been certified, it is "known good", in that there are not any sections of the disk that are unreliable. From this point on, for Thunderbolt connected disks in particular, the disk will manage this with SMART tracking. And SoftRAID catches any changes or events with the disks that can affect reliability.
What I mean, is the disks themselves record all types of data about the disks. The key parameters SoftRAID tracks are:
Reallocated sectors
Pending reallocations
Failed reallocations
Unreliable sectors
All these are measured and reported by SoftRAID. so if there is a change in the disk that adversely affects its lifespan, you get alerted.
What SoftRAID cannot detect at this time are more subtle changes, like disk hangs, time outs, things of that nature. The symptoms would be crashes, system hangs perhaps.
If you get symptoms that are unexplainable, and you rebuild your volumes, run Disk Warrior, etc, still have problems, then certify is a good test.
I don't see much benefit to an annual certify. But on HDD's it never hurts, so if you want to certify more frequently, go ahead.
Posted : 19/12/2018 3:15 pm
Topic starter
Thank you for the explanation. I had hoped that SMART monitoring after certification would be enough.
Posted : 20/12/2018 11:41 am
Mostly, it is. ;-)
Posted : 20/12/2018 12:57 pm
