I bought a used 6 TB HGST HUS726060ALA640 drive and am testing it because the price seemed suspiciously low. The drive appears to lack SMART support, so I started badblocks to check whether the disk is usable. Instead of showing the familiar readout with completed and remaining counts, it is only advancing by roughly one number per minute. The test reports around 1.46 billion sectors, which makes the estimated completion time seem absurdly long. Does this indicate that the drive is failing, or could something else be causing the extremely slow progress?
3 Answers
Be careful with badblocks options: a write-mode test is destructive and erases the disk. Even a read test can take a long time on a large disk, especially when the drive encounters unreadable areas and retries. If it starts slowing down again, check system logs for I/O errors and timeouts, inspect the enclosure power supply and cable, and consider the drive unsafe until it completes a full test without errors.
The first thing I would suspect is the enclosure or its connection. A reset may have cleared a controller or USB bridge problem, which would explain why the second badblocks run behaved normally. The model reports 512-byte logical sectors and 4K physical sectors, and SMART being unavailable can be a limitation of the enclosure or the drive interface. I would still test it outside that enclosure and run a long read test before trusting it with data.
A healthy 6 TB disk should not crawl at one block per minute. That usually points to repeated read retries, a failing drive, or a problem with the enclosure, cable, or controller. Also, SMART has existed for decades, so the absence of SMART is unusual for a 2015 HGST drive. It may be unavailable because the enclosure or connection is not passing SMART data through, rather than because the disk truly lacks it. Check the exact model and test it through a direct SATA or suitable HBA connection if possible.
The drive is an HGST HUS726060ALA640 from around 2015. After power-cycling the enclosure and starting badblocks again, it began progressing normally. The diagnostic tool still reports SMART as unavailable, though.