Six Disk Certification Questions

Question 1) Is it normal for the duration to keep increasing this long after having started, and for the disks to all state a different amount of time? They’re all the exact same make / model, so I expected them to take roughly the same amount of time.

To a degree, yes. The time remaining is a very rough estimate, based on the current throughput on the drive and how many passes are remaining. As a drive moves inwards, performance drops, so time remaining can increase slightly. The important information is it will take about 60 hours.

Question 2) How / when will I know how long this is actually going to take to complete? Does anyone have any rough guesstimate benchmarks / firsthand experience for drives this size / speed? (I searched the forums but didn’t find anything specifically matching this set up — the help says “a day or two” for 4TB drives, but some forum posts said 170+ hours for 2TB drives connected via USB 3....)

Each drive is different, so there is no definitive time. Thunderbolt will give the fastest times, and 60 hours is about right for 6TB drives.

We have seen behavior in some Seagate drive models which take much much longer, we will post in the forum about that in the near future.

Question 3) Is the “time remaining” displayed per pass, or is it for the entire Disk Certify operation (all 3 passes + random access testing)?

It is an estimate based on all "6" passes, a write, then a read across the entire drive.

Question 4) What happens if my computer crashes or there’s a power failure in the middle of the process? Is there a greater chance for the disks to be damaged? Will SoftRAID be able to resume the certification where it left off, or will I have to start all over?

We try to place a marker on the drive so SoftRAID can continue where it left off. the odds of a power failure causing the drive to fail are no higher than any other incident where there is a power failure.

- The use of a Power conditioner (often built into UPS's) is important if you prize your data!

Question 5) Can I quit the SoftRAID application, or does it need to remain open while the Certification is in process? (I'm scared to even try quitting it just to test...)

Certify requires the application to be running.

"Lastly, since I’ve never used the certify feature before — does SoftRAID make it plainly & obviously clear whether certification was successful or not? Or will I need to interpret log results? What makes for a successful certification? 0 errors and 0 sectors reallocated? Or does none of that matter so long as there were no i/o errors?"

A success is accompanied by a dialog box. Failure will also be announced and in the SoftRAID Log, it will show what sector failed the certify. When a drive has "too many" errors, SoftRAID will abort the test, as the disk is not reliable for user data.

Certify is an important task to run on any new drive. Drives are generally shipped completely untested so there is no way to know whether a drive is defective until the drive attempts to read/write to the bad portion of the drive. A user may not encounter this portion of the disk for months, for example. A certify not only lets a user know the disks are OK, but that their entire disk subsystem is OK. If you have a bad enclosure/cable, for example, the system will fail certify, so you know your system is not reliable for important data. Good enclosures are very reliable and a set of 4 disks in a Thunderbolt enclosure should never fail a certify test.

Great, thank you for the detailed information. You were correct -- all four disks ultimately did successfully complete certification after ~60 hours.