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From: Francisco Reyes <lists@stringsutils.com>
To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
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Cc: Doug Poland <doug@polands.org>, questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Exercising ATA disks in hopes of revealing errors
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Bill Moran writes:

> Check with the vendors, though.  Many drive manufacturers have utilities
> you can download specifically to check their drives.

If the drives are somewhat recent you can try using SMART to check them.
In particular you can use the smartmontools port.
You may need to enable SMART on the motherboard.

SMART = Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring%2C_Analysis%2C_and_Reporting_Te 
chnology

Syntax is
smartctl -t short /dev/ad0[1]
smartctl -t long /dev/ad0[2]
smartctl -l selftest /dev/ad0[3]

[1] If the short fails you know there are problems. Still no guarantee. 
Still worth to do quick tests first.

[2] If it fails, there is a good chance the drive has some sort of problems.

[3] Use that to check the result.