Yeah, it's a good way of fleshing out errors, but 3 passes can take a long time. DiskFresh is Windows-based, non-destructive, and faster if you'd like another option. Though if you're getting rid of the drives you'd want to zero them out anyway. Anyhow, DiskFrish is another option for you to consider:
http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
You can also use Speccy (or other software) to view SMART stats to get an idea of drive health after you wipe them.

clueless1 wrote on 2020-05-02, 20:06:

Yeah, it's a good way of fleshing out errors, but 3 passes can take a long time. DiskFresh is Windows-based, non-destructive, and faster if you'd like another option. Though if you're getting rid of the drives you'd want to zero them out anyway. Anyhow, DiskFrish is another option for you to consider:
http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
You can also use Speccy (or other software) to view SMART stats to get an idea of drive health after you wipe them.

they are used drives i got with the promise of destroying the data and sanitizing the drive anyway, just wondering if i needed to do something else after dban. Disk size starts at 3.1gb and climbs to 160gb IDE, ive got about 30 disks to go through, but ive also got a Pentium 4 doing nothing and a spare promise ATA133 card so i can dban 8 drives at a time.

Check the SMART values after running dban. dban itself does not re-read and compare what it writes, which is obvious, since it's for wiping data anyway.

Smart values obtained by some utilities.

gsmartcontrol, my favorite and tiny program, non-sense details in seconds. Under one of tabs: comes with is 3 levels of checks, quick check surface , long check surface, and transport check, some hard drives has a trip sensor that get tripped if jarred hard enough.

crystaldisk

Cheers,

well dban so far weeded out 3 320gb drives, a pair of 250gb, 1 160gb, 1 120gb, and right now working on the 80gb drives, followed by 60gb, then 40, 20, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6.4, and 3.1gb drives

Personally I use badblocks on a Linux machine for HDD testing. It can be run in a destructive and (much slower) non-desctructive mode. If you explicitly want to get rid of the data, the destructive test is ideal.

Destructive:
badblocks -wsv [path to device]

Non-destructive:
badblocks -nsv [path to device]

As usual Arch has the best manual

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-02, 19:45:

So I'm thinking of clearing my drive collection and using dban it does 3 passes of 0 to the drive to blank it out, is this also a good way to know if the drive is good, if it wipes successfully without error?

No. You should pay attention to SMART logs and timing.

SMART logs are not fully reliable (disks can fail without notice), but some of them (reallocated sectors count, current pending sectors count, load/unload cycles) can give you some hints.

The "timing" of the HDD is also important. Some HDD test programs (MHDD, WHDD, Victoria) show you some statistics about how much time is needed to read/write sectors (i.e.: number of sectors that took more than 500ms to access). That "lazy" sectors may actually being reallocated of soon-to-fail sectors.

(BTW, it's a shame that there are no new versons of MHDD capable of running on new systems. Although it's an old program, traditional (non SSD) HDDs also fail the same old way.)

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-05-03, 00:28:

gsmartcontrol, my favorite and tiny program, non-sense details in seconds. Under one of tabs: comes with is 3 levels of checks, quick check surface , long check surface, and transport check, some hard drives has a trip sensor that get tripped if jarred hard enough.

I like smartcontrol because you can launch read tests even on USB attached disks, at the same speed as internal ones (because SMART tests don't need to use USB bus). If you try to do a MHDD test over an USB attached disk, it will take much longer than doing the same over a SATA attached disk. Also, you may continue working on that HDD (but I don't recommend that) while the test is taking place, but it will take longer to complete.

The downside is that SMART tests stop at the first error, so they won't give you a clear picture of your HDD status (I strongly recommend to throw away any HDD with errors, but also I have some not-very-reliable disks dedicated to specific tasks, like feeding my Wii).

Also, some tools (like WinDFT and embedded tools on some BIOS) only do SMART tests. I'd still prefer using gsmartctl, because it throws more information.

(Note that, while short and long tests are "standard", "conveyance test" may not be available for every HDD).