I have purchased a new HDD for my backups. Before entrusting the device with the job of keeping my data safe I want to make sure that it is in good condition. The drive is a new internal 3.5 inch SATA drive.I started a destructive write test with badblocks using the following command.(Important: DON'T just copy paste the following command it will erase all data on your disk)# badblocks -wsv -t random /dev/<device>After ~ 1:30h the badblocks run has reached 0.36% completion. iotop reports average writespeeds between 1.6 and 2.5 MB/s which is about 1% of the write speed the drive should actually be capable of. The IO load reported by iotop is 99.9% though.Is there something odd going on or is it really common for badblocks to perform that slow?
What data transfer / write speeds are to be expected for a badblock destructible write test?
performance;badblocks;write
You need to add the -c option to do more than 64 blocks and probabky -b to specify a block size other than 1KiB. Right now you're doing 64KiB at a time, which is a lot of seeks.Something like:badblocks -c 2560 -b 4096 -wsv -t random /dev/deviceought to run much faster. That's 10MiB (= 4KiB  2560) at a time; go higher with -c if that's still not running full-speed. Also your disk likely has 4K sectors, hence the -b 4096. Otherwise one bad sector will be reported as 4.(You may wish to consider in additionor even insteadsmartctl -t long. And of course mirror your backups if you're paranoid.)