DDV DRIVE PREP Recommendation

Check Your Drive Before DEF CON

Planning to bring a hard drive or SSD to the Data Duplication Village? If your drive shows errors during the duplication process, it will be pulled and returned to you without the data you’re hoping to get.

While we strongly recommend bringing NEW 8 TB SATA3 drives to increase the chance of success (side note: our friends at Backblaze have accumulated statistics on thousands of drives in their environment, including new drives with very low failure rates), there are other ways to improve your rate of success.

Some people bring the same drive to the DDV every year. While these might have few hours on them, regardless of the time spent spinning, the older they get, the higher the failure rate becomes.

Take a few minutes before DEF CON to check the health of any drives you intend to bring. While no test can predict every failure, these tools can identify many common warning signs before you travel. Checking your drive’s health before coming can give you the time to swap out any failing drives, helping avoid disappointment.

SMART Analysis of drives:

Modern hard drives and SSDs maintain internal health statistics known as SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). A healthy drive will generally report:

No SMART failures
No critical warnings
No pending sectors
No uncorrectable sectors
No significant media errors

Consider investigating further or replacing your drives if you see:

SMART failure
Critical Warning
Reallocated Sectors
Pending Sectors
Offline Uncorrectable Sectors
Media Errors
Rapidly increasing error counts

Many drives continue operating despite these warnings, but they may be at increased risk of failure. If your drive shows warnings or failing health status, we recommend setting that drive aside and bringing a new drive for the DDV to use for duplication.

While this information does not certify a drive as healthy, it can help with early identification of warning signs.

What type of drives does the DDV recommend?

Other than going with 8TB drives, we don’t. We are frequently asked which drives are the best and, while we have no official opinion, we have some good data at our disposal. Check out our historical data from past cons at https://dcddv.org and the reports that Backblaze publishes:

Below are some instructions for checking SMART data on your drives for various operating systems. We assume you know how to attach a drive to your computer, and you trust the drive you plan to attach to your computer.

Have fun and make good choices!

Getting SMART Data on Windows

Option 1: CrystalDiskInfo (Recommended)

CrystalDiskInfo is a free utility that provides an easy-to-read summary of drive health. https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/xp8k4rgx25g3gm

Install and launch CrystalDiskInfo.
Select the drive you plan to bring.
Review the reported Health Status.

Typical results:

Good — No obvious warnings detected.
Caution — One or more attributes may require attention.
Bad — The drive is reporting serious problems.

If the drive reports Caution or Bad, closely review the SMART details before relying on the drive. Zero Raw Values in these items are ideal: Read Error Rate, Reallocated Sectors Count, Reallocation Event Count, Current Pending Sector Count, Uncorrectable Sector Count.

Option 2: PowerShell

Open PowerShell and run:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter

A zero “ReadErrorsUncorrected” value is a positive sign. A high PowerOnHours value is a good cautionary indicator.

Getting SMART Data on macOS

Built-In Method

Open Apple Menu → About This Mac → General
Select System Report.
Select Storage.
Locate your drive.
Review the SMART Status field.

A healthy drive will typically report:

SMART Status: Verified

Second Built-In Option

In Terminal list attached disks, by running:

diskutil list

Identify the /dev/disk# of your disk and display the SMART data for it by running:

diskutil info disk#

(Replace the ‘#’ with the appropriate disk number)

Look for the SMART status. If it shows Verified, no serious errors have been identified. If you see a line like this, no serious errors have been identified:

S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified

Advanced More Data Method (smartctl)

Install smartmontools from https://www.smartmontools.org. The current version can be found at GitHub here:

https://github.com/smartmontools/smartmontools/releases

We recommend validating the downloaded file’s MD5 hash. The md5 tool is built into MacOS. On modern MacOSes you may also need to allow installation via:

System Settings → Privacy & Security → Security → “Open Anyway”

Some useful commands with this tool are

Identifying attached drives:

sudo smartctl  --scan

To see the detailed SMART data:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/disk#

(Replace the ‘#’ with the appropriate disk number)

Note: If your Mac has an NVMe disk you may receive an error running smartctl --scan (the DDV does note accept NVMe drives).

Review the output for SMART failures, media errors, or critical warnings. Example:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Model Number:                       APPLE SSD AP1024Z

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02, NSID 0xffffffff)

Critical Warning:                   0x00

Temperature:                        38 Celsius

Available Spare:                    100%

Available Spare Threshold:          99%

Percentage Used:                    1%

Data Units Read:                    197,905,310 [101 TB]

Data Units Written:                 85,424,017 [43.7 TB]

Host Read Commands:                 5,489,642,997

Host Write Commands:                1,872,261,831

Controller Busy Time:               0

Power Cycles:                       287

Power On Hours:                     1,542

Unsafe Shutdowns:                   7

Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0		🡨--- You want no errors

Error Information Log Entries:      0		🡨--- You want no errors

Getting SMART Data on Linux

Install smartmontools using your distribution’s package manager. The source can be found at GitHub here:

https://github.com/smartmontools/smartmontools/releases