I bought a used 6 TB drive and am testing it with badblocks because the price seemed suspiciously low. The drive appears to be an older HGST HUS 726060ALA640 from around 2015, and SMART reports that it is unavailable. Instead of showing a normal progress display such as completed blocks out of the total, badblocks is only incrementing by roughly one number per minute. There are about 1.46 billion sectors, so at that rate the scan would take an absurdly long time. Does this indicate that the drive is failing, or could the enclosure or connection be causing the problem?
3 Answers
The reported information identifies the device as a 6 TB HGST HUS 726060ALA640 with 512-byte logical blocks and 4K physical blocks. The fact that the tool says SMART is unavailable does not by itself prove the disk is dead; it may simply be a limitation of the device interface or enclosure. Still, treat a used drive with no usable health data as untrusted and do not store the only copy of anything important on it. Let the full read test finish and review any I/O errors afterward.
Power-cycling the enclosure was a useful thing to try. A stuck or misbehaving enclosure can leave the disk responding extremely slowly, which makes badblocks look like it is barely moving. Since the scan is now progressing normally, the original symptom may have been the enclosure, cable, bridge, or a temporary device hang rather than proof that every sector is bad.
That behavior is not normal for a healthy drive. First, check the exact model and how it is connected; SMART has been common for decades, so a 2015 drive lacking it is unusual, although some external enclosures, USB bridges, or enterprise interfaces do not pass SMART data through. If the drive is returning errors or repeatedly timing out, badblocks can appear to crawl while waiting for each operation.
The drive is an HGST HUS 726060ALA640. After power-cycling the enclosure and starting badblocks again, the progress began behaving normally.