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by e40 2704 days ago
I have. Last time I bought a bunch of drives for a RAID array, I used the WD utility to test each of them. 1 of the 6 failed the test.
2 comments

The first time I learned about burnin, it was because the drives for our RAID array showed up three days before we were supposed to start experimenting. Two of the ten were DOA. FED-EX got us replacements in two days. One of those was dead.

So then I started doing math on MTBF and lots of drives and things looked bleak. Just a couple years later MTBF had gone way up and continued to climb for a while after, but at that particular moment it was something like eight months between failure of you had any more drives than we had and just accelerated from there.

"Failed" as in "with an IO error" as in "got the wrong data back"?

Because if it's the latter, it could've been caused by some other part of IO stack and not necessarily the drive itself.

I believe the WD utility sends a command to the drive so it does a self test. That would eliminate any upper layers issues.