How long does badblocks take on a 1TB drive?

Question

I'm running badblocks (or rather "e2fsck -c") on a 1TB drive and if the progress indicator is any indication (no pun intended), it's going to take almost forever to complete.

Right now it says 0.01% done, 30:20 elapsed which would mean the thing would take 17 weeks or so to complete, which seems rather excessive in my book.

Is that a normal amount of time for such a check to take or it simply that my suspicions are correct in that the drive is failing, thus causing the check to take only slightly shorter than eternity?

I found this question here, but that pertains to the amount of passes done.

Answer 1

To answer you question, the closest I can offer is with a 3TB I tested for this. Here are the 3 times tests I did, only changing the parameter values for -c and only doing them up to 10% since they took A LOT of time. Each was done 3 times to get an average.

badblocks -svn /dev/sdb

To get to 1%: 1 Hour
To get to 10%: 8 hours 40 minutes

badblocks -svn -b 512 -c 32768 /dev/sda

To get to 1%: 35 Minutes
To get to 10%: 4 hours 10 minutes

badblocks -svn -b 512 -c 65536 /dev/sda

To get to 1%: 16 Minutes
To get to 10%: 2 hours 35 minutes

So yes, the -c parameter has a very big influence on the time it takes to check the drive. I would guess that for a 1 TB Hard drive, assuming it maintains the same time frame as the 3TB, it would be 1/3 of the time mentioned here, so to get to 10% with -c 65536 on the 1 TB HDD it would be about 50 minutes.

Answer 2

Badblocks makes 4 runs. On a 1 TB external HD it usually takes around 70 hours.

Answer 3

I'm running badblocks on WD Red 4TB drives. Since they're 4k sector drives (checked using lsblk -o NAME,PHY-SeC) I'm running it with -b 4096. I wanted to give each of the badblocks instances ~800Mb of RAM so I used -c 200000 which gives you 4096 bytes * 200,000 blocks = 800,000 Kb. They started out with abour 800Mb each but that crept up over time. These settings do provide a significant speedup over standard settings though.

It ran 1% in 3min 56sec but that's 1% of 4 patterns. It also seems to take more time the closer you get to the end of a run. It checked the disk with the first pattern in about 17hrs so it should complete 4TB in about 68hr.

COMMAND BELOW RUNS A DESTRUCTIVE WRITE

Command I'm using is: badblocks -svw -b 4096 -c 200000 /dev/sdc -o bb_sdc.txt

Answer 4

Try increasing amount of blocks processed together, like in badblocks -svn -b 512 -c 65536 /dev/sda. In this way, I can get a 1 TB hard disk drive checked in 8 hours.

Answer 5

Ran this the day before yesterday on a failed 1 TB drive in my 6TB RAID 6 (DESTRUCTIVE WRITE MODE!):

# badblocks -svw -b 4096 -c 65536 /dev/sdb

Mainboard is an ASRock Rack C2550D4I (I know…) with 8x Samsung SpinPoint M8 HN-M101MBB (I know…) connected to the SATA3 Ports. The drives are 4K "Advanced Format" drives, hence the 4K block size.

badblocks took about 28 hours to finish, with no errors.

The single drives do ~105 MB/sec (average hdparm -tT buffered read timing), 200–230 MB/sec when testing the whole array. Nothing superior, nowadays, but nice for a pile of old Laptop drives.

Hope this helps as much as this thread helped me to find a quick way to do a badblocks run on the disk. I know its use is dubious these days, but when a previous smartctl -t long failed due to read failures, I decided to have all sectors touched and rewritten a few times to see how the S.M.A.R.T. values would change. Another smartctl Test is pending, if that again fails, I shall shop for a new drive.

Answer 6

Some performance observations:

I'm running e2fsck -c -c -v /dev/sda2, which resides on this device:

/dev/sda2  77056 976754431 976677376  3.7T Linux filesystem

The current runtime for 63.5% is 53:28:40; 53.5 hours. The rate of progress is 1.186%/hour. At this rate, it will take an additional 31 hours to complete, with an estimated total run time of 85 hours. This a USB 3.0 device. iotop indicates the average read/write speed is about 25MB/s. So far, zero bad blocks have been found.

The underlying command line run by e2fsck is:

sh -c badblocks -b 4096 -X -s -n /dev/sda2 976677375

Posts to StackOverflow state it is safe to interrupt badblocks with ^C (SIGTERM). Should I do so, I don't see the downside of stopping this test, and resuming it in the future later, as this is a disk block-level operation. I must unmount this filesystem before resuming at the percent scan completed.