Almost four years ago, I bought a set of 14TB WD Elements . They were the cheapest HDD option on the market at the time, with quite good disks. I still own them today, and they work in my main PC, thanks to the tape patch. Time flies, and the space on my NAS has been filling up-it’s almost full now. I had a quite old Synology DS213j, and it’s time to replace its 8TB drives with something more substantial.

Let’s see what’s in the package this time.

Probing drive with smartctl
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdd
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.14.0-36-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     WDC WD200EDGZ-11CNKA0
Serial Number:    SZGYPV7V
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000cca 405cd80c5
Firmware Version: 85.00A85
User Capacity:    20 000 588 955 648 bytes [20,0 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        Not in smartctl database 7.3/5528
ATA Version is:   ACS-5 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.5, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Sat Nov 29 13:20:33 2025 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Let’s see how it performs:

Screenshot of disk benchmark

Average read/write just below 200MB/s is absolutely fine for a storage disk. It’s interesting, that my older 14TB drives had more consistent access times, but again: for data hoarding it makes no big difference.

Pre-heating

I like to stress-test new disks a bit to ensure they won’t fail early. Since I plan to shuck them, I’ll lose the warranty, so I want to make sure they don’t have any issues that might be caused by bad transportation or physical faults.

I initially used badblocks for this, but when I tried to run it, it failed:

Running badblocks with default block size
sudo badblocks -b 4096 -wsv /dev/sdd
badblocks: Value too large for defined data type invalid end block (4882948096): must be 32-bit value

It looks like 32-bit values aren’t sufficient to count blocks 😅. I searched for other tools that could generate a similar workload and found fio. I started with the following command:

Testing drive performance with fio
sudo fio --name=drive-test --filename=/dev/sdd --direct=1 --rw=readwrite --bs=10M --size=100% --numjobs=1

Unfortunately, the performance was terrible-barely 50MB/s. At this speed, it would take 4–6 days to complete. I tried badblocks again but modified the sector size:

Running badblocks with adjusted sector size
sudo badblocks -b 8192 -wsv /dev/sdd

And it worked! Checking iotop, I saw it was running between 200–300 MB/s. It will still take more than a day to overwrite the drive, but that’s reasonable.

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