I bought a couple of 14TB external drives over the weekend, which were on sale for $200. I’m going to remove them from their enclosures and put them in my ThunderBay 6 to expand our home server storage.

But before I put them into use, I want to make sure the drives are in good shape. I’ve decided to make use of SoftRAID’s 14-day free trial to run the app’s certify process on them. This writes data to all of the sectors on the disk and ensures that it’s readable. And you can set the number of times you’d like it to run. I’m in the middle of the second iteration on the first disk and there’ve been no errors so far.

I’ve seen people recommend running this process up to three times before putting your data on a new drive, but I think I’m only going to run it twice. If only because it’s an extremely long process, especially for large disks.

➝ Source: owcdigital.com